Spending three hours a day commuting is pretty annoying at times, however it has given me the opportunity to do a lot of research and read lots of great books. With this in mind, I decided to write a blog post about some of the best digital marketing, design and UX books I’ve read or that I am intending on reading soon.
Books that I would recommend:
SEO Secrets – Danny Dover:
SEO Secrets is the most comprehensive SEO book that I’ve read and it features lots of actionable content. Danny, who worked with a host of blue-chip clients whilst working as a consultant at SEOmoz, covers all of the key aspects of search marketing and provides recommendations on best practice consultancy.
This book also features examples of key client documents, with tips on how to make your reports and proposals more effective.
Convert – Ben Hunt:
Convert is a popular conversion rate optimisation book that is suitable for CRO enthusiasts of all experience levels. I read this book last year after my colleague bought me a copy and gave it a raving review.
The part of the book that we both found most interesting was the ‘awareness ladder’, which is based on adapting the content on pages of your website to suit readers at the right stage of the buying cycle. The ‘awareness ladder’ is very similar to the more commonly referenced AIDA model, but specifically focused on web pages and with six stages.
A Practice Guide to Information Architecture – Donna Spencer:
This book was published in 2010 and is a must-read for serious IA’s. I recently starting read this book after it was recommended to me as ‘the book to read’ for information architecture.
This book provides some great recommendations for structuring content to provide a better user experience. In addition to talking about approaches and principles, it also outlines how IA should fit into design and build processes and also which types of people tend to make good IA’s.
I haven’t actually finished reading this book yet, however I felt that it needed to be included.
I started reading Don’t Make Me Think recently because it had been recommended to me by about 20 people, and I can see why. This book provides recommendations and examples of good UX based on making things obvious to the user – so not making them think.
The concept of making your site’s navigation easy by designing and positioning call to actions so that they represent the obvious next step is something that all web designers should be applying to websites.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone involved in building websites – be it a Project Manager, Information Architect, Front-end Designer/Developer or Programmer.
I read this e-book a year ago after Steve Lock, of Analytics SEO, recommended it to me as one of the best SEO books he’d read.
This book features a number of actionable tips for link building, whilst also outlining and detailing case studies from link building campaigns. Key topics covered in this book include link prospecting, blogger outreach principles, link profiling and link building processes.
The Clockwork Pirate – Kelvin Newman:
I read The Clockwork Pirate (which is free) around 18 months ago and consider it to be one of the best link building books out there – just as good as the paid Ontolo book in my opinion.
I frequently recommend this book to people who are just getting into link building as it contains lots of actionable tips and is great for inspiration. There are also lots of recommendations for tools that will help make finding and building links easier.
- The Art of SEO – Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessica Strichiola & Rand Fishkin
- Inbound Marketing – David Meerman Scott, Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah
- SEO An hour a day – Jennifer Grappone & Gradiva Couzin
Books I intend to read soon:
- Rocket surgery made easy (second book from Steve Krug)
- Information is beautiful (book about infographics)
- Freakonomics (not relevant to these topics but I’ve been meaning to read it for ages)
- A practical guide to designing for the web (by Mark Boulton)
- Effective Project Management (By Robert K Wysocki)
