On the other side of that screen are international businesses generating $US32 billion annually, with Google taking $21 billion of that digital marketing revenue in 2008.

Rebecca Lieb's new book, The Truth About Search Engine Optimization (SEO), looks at the middle ground between us and the search engines. This is a valley inhabited by digital media agencies and their clients, web developers, producers of content and the inevitable snake-oil salespersons.

Lieb's book is a well-written, amusing and intelligent 200-page introduction to a universe where 50,000 people worldwide are employed to anticipate the one, two or three words we type into a search box – which we do daily at search engines, news sites, home pages, video-sharing portals and online sales operations.

So, who clicks where, why do we do it and what was in the results list that caught our attention?

On one side, trying to influence our searching decisions, are the snake-oil salespeople. These urgers make apparently compelling promises to website owners and business proprietors. "We'll get you to page one in Google," they claim, "maybe even the top spot."

Lieb's book is a welcome antidote to the chicanery of these "black hat" operators in the SEO game. She writes from an editorial and user perspective, suggesting that high-quality content, good website architecture and ease of accessibility to a site's offerings are the cornerstone of being found on the web.

And a site's ability to be "well found" means we, as searchers, will be happy seekers, rather than frustrated searchers, seething at the screen and abandoning our search activity. - Financial Times Press/Pearson