Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO

by Cristian Darie, Jaimie Sirovich, Jaimie Sirovich

Maybe you're a great programmer or IT professional, but marketing isn't your thing. Or perhaps you're a tech-savvy search engine marketer who wants a peek under the hood of a search engine optimized web site. Search engine marketing is a field where technology and marketing are both critical and interdependent, because small changes in the implementation of a web site can make you or break you in search engine rankings. Furthermore, the fusion of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470100923
• ISBN13: 9780470100929
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Wrox Press
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

a good introduction to SEO for PHP developers

Until recently, I had been under the impression that search engine optimization was wishful thinking, since Google et al are so covert regarding their proprietary ranking algorithms. While that's true, this book provides as much insight as could be expected into the empirical tricks of search engine optimization. I read it cover-to-cover, including the Appendix! If it weren't for some "duplicate content", early on, I would give it 6 stars! Consistent with the PHP camp, this book is very pragmatic, offering specific code solutions to each SEO issue, raised ... AND most thorough explanations of the code, following each example. If you, like me, thought of SEO as a 'black art', you'll find this an easy and enlightening read. Then, you can set about correcting the things that you did to your website, obliviously, which hurt its "Page Rank".

Great Resource -

The SEO tactics, and information in this book I found very illuminating, and helpful when coupled with my current development's SEO needs. I suggest this book to anyone seeking SEO specifics, and prefers to have control versus paying an outside firm. I'd purchased another SEO book prior to this one and found lots of general information, but no specific tactics - which is all that is required. Simplicity is genius, and in my opinion that is what this book provides. -n8

Solid PHP How-To

Last year, I reviewed the book Ajax and PHP by Cristian Darie. Since then, he and I have kept in touch. When he asked if I would like to read his latest writing endeavor, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP, I was immediately interested. He joined Jaimie Sirovich in co-authoring this one, and they are also writing a companion version on SEO with ASP.NET. Their ASP.NET edition will be available in August of 2007. First off, here's a bit of background info about the authors. Jaimie Sirovich is a self-titled "SEO Egghead" and is a hybrid programmer turned search engine marketer. What makes him uniquely qualified is that he understands the tech side of SEO and isn't just a slimey snake oil salesman who spouts off conjecture. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Cristian Darie is a software engineer and PhD student, currently studying distributed application architecture for his dissertation. He has published several books on a variety of web topics - including: Ajax, ASP.NET, PHP and SQL. Needless to say, he is himself quite the server-side programmer as well. The book starts off by defining who it is written for: PHP programmers and search engine marketers. Programmers will benefit because this book talks about the factors that help improve readability of URLs for both humans and search engines. For instance, using Apache's mod_rewrite to create: (...) As opposed to: (...) Marketers will benefit from this book because rather than rely on the myriad of disinformation that is available (leading one another in circular logic), they can start to understand things from a more concrete perspective and begin to make more accurate assessments. If it's true that All Marketers are Liars, then at least they will sound more convincing when it comes to SEO. Once the basics are out of the way, this book delves into more tangible code examples, showing how to use .htaccess redirects as well as HTTP responses to your advantage. They also cover the concept of cloaking, such as employed by the New York Times, allowing search engines to index their content, but not cache it. This enables them to rank high in relevant search results, but also requires a subscription to read it. Apparently, Google turns a blind eye for big business, but potentially punishes smaller sites for such practices. They also explain how to use "white hat" methods such as IP sniffing, to make sure that international readers receive pages that are relevant to their particular locale. While not always 100% accurate, this can assist in returning pages in the correct language for a particular country or region. Additionally, they explain how to use sitemap XML and text files to describe to Google and Yahoo, respectively, the information architecture of your site. This is helpful for sites which are inherently inaccessible due to excessive use of Flash or Ajax. While it's certainly no substitute for semantic code, at least search engines know you have more than jus

A must read for PHP developers who develop commercial websites

Most websites are developed without SEO in mind. They are often developed by teams that have a very deep knowledge and understanding about programming websites and applications, databases and also general business and e-commerce. A large (if not the most) number of those teams only have little or no knowledge of SEO at all. The result is a website that might violates some of the very basic rules of creating a site that is well accessible and understandable for the human visitors as well as the non-human visitors (the search engine spiders or crawlers). Changing a site after it is live and around for a while, when somebody realizes that search engine traffic is not the way it should be, can be very costly and in the worst cases may be even require an almost entire rewrite of the website code. That's why is it important that not only marketers are being educated about the benefits and principles of search engine optimization, but the people that build websites as well. Who builds websites? Web developers. This book was written exactly for this audience, but also a SEO who knows most of the information to SEO provided in the book could benefit from this book. It includes a lot of very practical PHP sample source code for ready to use tools that can help marketers in their daily routine. Although a lot of the content is not PHP specific are other parts that are using a lot of sample source code to demonstrate possible solutions, specific for Apache web servers (.htaccess), PHP and MySQL Databases.

Programming an SEO site

Creating a website that can be found among all the other sites on the web has always been important to the success of any site. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is as important to the marketing of a website as image optimization is to its graphic design. For dynamic-driven websites such as BellaOnline, it is a continuous challenge to maintain search engine optimization. This book by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie is written for the PHP programmer who needs to understand the many technical issues involved when programming a search-engine-friendly site from attracting search engine spiders to site promotion. Throughout the book, you will find code examples and practice exercises which show how to implement the techniques covered in the book. The authors begin with a discussion of the programming environment including setting up the MySQL server and then move on to tools and resources for the IT professional and the basics of search engine optimization. One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the URL. The URLs that you generate for your pages must not only be search engine friendly but also people friendly. The authors discuss how to make the task of creating and managing search-engine-friendly URLs easier. Another problem you will encounter is duplicate content which will harm your site's search engine rating. The authors discuss many ways to prevent or minimize this problem such as using robots.txt and meta exclusion. Your site visitors enjoy those cool looking interactive features, such as fancy menus, that can be created using JavaScript, Ajax and Flash. These same features make it difficult for search engines to find your site. However, web readers have come to expect a certain amount of interactivity and without at least a few of these goodies, your site will be bland by today's standards. The authors discuss this problem and cover several ways to help such as generating SEO images and the use of graphic text. One of the most popular ways to promote a website is with RSS feeds and syndication. To be effective, these feeds must be updated as new content is added to your site. This can be time consuming especially if your site is updated several times a minute. Two answers to this problem offered by the authors are to automate the generation of RSS feeds with a PHP class and displaying feeds with SimplePie. A standard for a good search engine friendly site is a good sitemap system. As with RSS feeds, keeping a sitemap updated can be a challenge and the authors show you how to create a traditional and an XML-based sitemap. Once your site is live, your job as an IT professional has just begun. There are many SEO technical issues the authors touch on including maintaining your site, changing hosts and cross linking. One thing that makes a technical-heavy book like this more helpful is a working example that incorporates what you have learned. The case study for this book is an E-commerce store and catalog. The