Foreword
What to write when one of your favorite heroes invites you to write the foreword to his latest book? Well, the best thing I can do is to share with you why I think this way, and why for you, after reading this book, maybe it could be the same. When I was about to finish my first degree at the University of Cologne in Germany, when we talked about Marketing, we referred to things like catalogs, print advertising, billboards, TV ads, radio, magazines, etc. and Google was not a topic because it did not yet exist in Europe.
Today, 21 years later, things have changed radically: 96% of Europeans use Google almost every day. Google leads the advertising market. Publishers denounce him, hoping to get a piece of the pie. The European Commission has fined it billions of euros for abuse of position. The existence of many e-commerce businesses depends almost entirely on traffic from Google, and according to a study by the European Commission, changes in the search engine affect 66% of European SMEs active on the Internet.
Thus, SEO is a new challenge for entrepreneurs and its relevance is easily deducible: to be visible right there, where your customers are consuming services, information or products. But if we are honest, SEO is not the challenge per se, the biggest challenge companies face is the non-existence of standards for learning SEO.
In medicine there are standards. A doctor in Papua New Guinea will treat a fracture just as well as a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. Everyone follows a standardized global curriculum, which allows you to hold all doctors to the established standard.
In SEO, although many of us are working on it, this does not yet exist. Some people invest 20 € per month to learn SEO and others invest 5000 €, and the quality of their work will finally depend not on the amount they have paid, but on who they have learned it.
And for that reason Fernando Maciá is my hero.
In this book Fernando will take you by the hand, he will explain step by step, with humility, what you should know and what he has learned in twenty years of experience. He will use simple language because he wants to share his knowledge with you, and for you to understand him. He will give you clear examples, because he knows what he is talking about. He will give you sources and contrasted information, because he has experience and thinks long term.
It won’t explain tricks or shortcuts (no business and no great work that prevails has been built that way), but it will help you to be a professional, to understand Google and its evolution so that you can get ahead today and tomorrow. It will teach you that SEO is dynamic, that today it is more alive than ever, it is profitable and you can learn it reliably and successfully.
The first time Fernando Maciá met me personally was on January 21, 2015 in Madrid. On that occasion I told him that for me it was like meeting a rock star personally, because with his books, publications, presentations, classes and many other things, he has professionalized SEO in the Spanish-speaking world, he is one of the greatest disseminators of our profession, he is a pioneer and the father of many SEOs who work successfully in digital marketing in large companies. He respects everyone and is respected by the entire community.
A hero is not easy to define, but he is surely an altruistic person who, regardless of the circumstances and his position in life, of the doubts he may have and of not knowing all the answers, will represent the highest level a human can reach and in the end will win for the good of all of us. Isn’t Fernando a hero?
Enjoy it.
Juan Gonzalez
Head of Marketing
Sistrix GmbH