★★★★ Website Optimization by Andrew B. King is from O’Reilly (2008). The title refers to optimizing speed, ease of use, search engine friendliness, and return on investment. There’s a lot of information in the book about how to market your site and generate profit.
The book begins with search engine optimization. Then it discusses pay-per-click optimization and related ideas such as keyword discovery, landing pages and bids. There’s a case study for each of the first two topics. The remainder of the book deals with performance optimization. The performance optimization chapters cover web page optimization, CSS optimization, Ajax optimization, and advanced topics like server-side and client-side techniques. The final chapter discusses various types of metrics that you can use to measure success.
There are a mixture of techniques ranging from ways to write good ad copy to technical advice about using Apache mod_cache and HTTP compression included.
I think the audience for this information is not the small designer, but the people who are responsible for a large site with heavy traffic—the copy writers, designers, developers, and marketers all will find tips for their particular job in this book.
Summary: A very good resource