Book Review: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP

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
  • August 27, 2007 at 12:21 pm Rusty

    Nice Review,

    I listened to your UPHPU presentation last week that covered some of the topics in this book. Very well done. I would love to get my hands on a copy of it – did you say that it is in UPHPU’s libray?

    -Rusty

  • August 28, 2007 at 7:43 am Sheri Bigelow

    Thank you Rusty. Yes, you should be able to check out the book next and one other person would like to reserve it after you’re done.

  • July 6, 2009 at 11:23 pm Sandy Saini

    Well said, finally a good report on this stuff

  • July 7, 2009 at 3:44 am Sandip Saini

    Very interesting… thanks.

  • October 7, 2009 at 8:50 am Helen Hunt - Free Links

    Lovely, I like this book. Thanks for the nice review.

  • December 24, 2009 at 3:01 am Aretha Stefansky

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  • January 4, 2010 at 2:01 am | Pretty Women Gallery

    Search engine optimization is indeed an important strategy to increase traffic into your website. If you have an online business, more visitors mean higher possibility of buyers. And if you have a monetized blog, more visitors mean higher possibility of more people clicking on the ads. I do SEO for my websites and blogs. And this has helped me a lot in my success.

  • March 2, 2010 at 2:34 am Mohammad Palamino

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  • March 20, 2010 at 2:13 pm Hipolito M. Wiseman

    Can I have this copied? I will link back to your blog. Is that ok?

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