Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO by Jaimie Sirovich, Cristian Darie
Publisher: Wrox (April 16, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0470100923
ISBN-13: 978-0470100929

From url canonicalization to link bait, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP hits all the SEO basics a php programmer could need. Billed as a book written for the php developer or tech-savvy marketer, this book attempts to debunk a few myths and protect you from the black arts of black hat seo while offering up a healthy dose of code examples and tool suggestions.

Co-authored by American Jaimie Sirovich and Romanian Cristian Darie, Pro SEO with PHP has a unique flair for foreign language SEO. Also included are tactics for avoiding (im)proper cloaking and the basics of geo-targeting. Rounding out the book are chapters on an e-commerce case study and SEO for WordPress including several lovely plugin suggestions.

Finally, there’s a hidden piece on regular expressions in the appendix, which goes quite nicely with the chapter and code examples about url re-writing. Matt Cutts, Google SEO extraordinaire, is quoted quite a bit along with a few other books and blogs and including a sprinkling of tools and WordPress plugins throughout to please any SEO. Overall, I really liked the book.

I couldn’t sum it up better than Cristian Darie himself, so I’ve borrowed his summary of the book which just so happens to be a great example of copy complete with all the right terms in bold, optimized for both humans and machines. To spice up the list just a bit (and add a bit of SEO myself), I have added in various links to relevant sites and articles.

• Understanding the criteria that influence search engine rankings
• Building keyword-rich URLs using PHP, Apache, and mod_rewrite
• Using the HTTP headers to properly indicate the status of web documents
• Relocating content using the proper HTTP status codes
• Coping with duplicate content effectively to avoid penalization
• Avoiding being the victim of black hat SEO techniques
• Implementing geo-targeting and cloaking using IP delivery
• Promoting your site using web feeds and social bookmarking
• Optimizing your web pages using better HTML and JavaScript
• Enhancing existing web sites
• Using search engine and traditional site maps effectively
• SEO for WordPress blogs
• Building a SE-optimized E-Commerce catalog case-study

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Reviews, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.