There's a few thousand different books and e-books you can buy in stores either on or offline, or download online. I personally like e-books better because of their simplicity and price, which is usually free! And they are just like regular books. They are yours to keep and you can read them whenever you like. One of my favorite sites to go to is called Free-eBooks dot net. I go to this site for just about any e-book I'm looking for online.

And all the books on this site are completely %100 free so you don't even have to worry about prices. They offer just over 2 pages of Optimization books, an astonishing 20 pages of Marketing books. Of course there's probably a mish mash between the two keywords but still, that's a pretty good amount of FREE e-books to search for on this site. Some other really good sites you know you can count on for e-books is Amazon, Adobe, and PlanetPdf. Out of these selections Amazon offers a really large selection but of course most of the e-books on Amazon aren't going to be free, but the rest will be.

The best two best stores in my opinion, offline, to get marketing books or any sort of search engine or optimization books is Barnes & Noble and Borders. The next time your in or around one of these two stores try searching in the Business or Internet/Computer section. If you cant find what your looking for, just ask!

Now on to the actual books. Which ones are highly recommended? Which ones are bombs? Well I suppose for a free e-book this doesn't really matter as much, because it is free. But if your like me, and your the type of person that doesn't like wasting precious time, then it does matter to a certain extent. Here's some really GREAT books to get your hands on:

Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site by Bill Hunt

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Peter Kent

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone

The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Marketing: Pay Per Click Advertising Secrets Revealed by Bruce C. Brown

Out of these books Ive either heard good things from people Ive worked with, have read some of them myself, or they just received REALLY good reviews. I'm more of a "dummy" follower myself. Of course there's a lot more books you could check out but this is just the jumping off point if you didn't know where to start and with what books. Remember optimizing and marketing your site are two really important things when you have your own site.

Marketing + Optimization = better chance of visitors. If no one knows about your site (marketing) or you don't build your site on certain fundamentals you should be following, then most likely your not going to receive the amount of traffic you would really like. Even if your not selling anything per se, you still want visitors to your site!

Example I have a Cooking website. I'm not necessarily selling anything on there (although i do have 2 affiliate programs) but I still want people to go to my site for the other things I have on their such as my CPM banners, feature blogs /posts, contextual ads etc. There's no real point in having things on your site to make you money (either directly or indirectly) if you don't have the traffic to back it up.

Take a site that optimizes and markets the "correct" way and another site that does none of this. Which one do you think is going to get the most visitors? Which site has the potential to make money? The one that's more optimized and marketed definitely will! Go read the books and do the work that's necessary for you to succeed. It may take some time but I guarantee if you take all the steps needed, you will get to where you want. Your site just as well could be a HUGE money maker! Good luck!