The big game of web publishers is the rank in search engine results. It's well known that most search engine users pick sites within the first one or two pages of search engine results. This means your site had better rank within the top 20 results or it's going to be difficult to be known, through organic search results. It's possible to become known through other ways such as twitter and other social networking or paid search results. Organic search results can be a steady stream of traffic which will pay off for years to come if done well.
Get to the top on Google is an excellent guide to working the ropes of search engine optimization (SEO) and improve your search engine rankings.
The method used is to present a fictional small business in Idaho and their quest to improve their business by through having a web site. The fictional business makes for an excellent backdrop for explaining SEO techniques.
The process is broken down into steps that build upon prior steps. All through the book various excellent websites are listed some of which are on the authors own website.
Phrases that pay is keyword analysis of the phrases frequently used in search engine queries, and what phrases are the best ones to target for your web site.
Courting the crawl explains how the search engines find pages and websites, which explains what it is you're trying to manipulate through SEO techniques.
Priming your pages discusses how to organize your pages so they're most easily digestible and usable by search engines.
Landing the links discusses the importance of links to your site and links within the site. Google especially works by counting the number of links to a given site to determine popularity. But there are white-hat and black-hat methods in getting links to your site. The search engines have years of experience detecting black hat manipulation techniques and will blackball your site for using them.
Paying for position shows how to use paid search results programs such as AdWords.
Making the map is about geographic localities, languages, Google Maps, Google Earth, etc. A localized business wants to be known within their locality and it doesn't help them if their SEO techniques make them known on the other side of the planet.
Tracking and tuning shows how to use tools to determine how successful your SEO efforts are.