Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP A Developers Guide to SEO

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 technology and marketing know-how can create web site features that attract more visitors.

The mission of this book is to help web developers create web sites that rank well with the major search engines, and to teach search engine marketers how to use technology to their advantage. We assert that neither marketing nor IT can exist in a vacuum, and it is essential that they not see themselves as opposing forces in an organization. They must work together. This book aims to educate both sides in that regard.

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars Get Your Playground Up and Running
Given the relative advanced topic of this book, I was surprised to find a section on how to get your “playground” up and running. They devote 4 pages to getting XAMPP up and running. However, once you are beyond that, the good stuff starts to unfold.

1 Star Complete disappointment – nothing professional here
I’ve read through this book from first to last page in a hope of finding any valuable information and must say, that most of what the book suggests is of no value to any professional in field. It’s begins with some general giberrish about SEO, which is of no real value and can be collected over the web within hour. Then follow some worn out URI rewriting recipes, which I would be ashamed of offering as an solution to any of my clients and call them “SEO”. Then ending chapters again are some general giberish, not a dime better that what can be found on web for free.

If the title read “Beginning SEO with PHP”, that would be somehow acceptable and the content would be OK, but there is nothing “Professional” in this book.

Firstly, going with PHP4 for your examples in 2007 is a little bit um… “anachronous”.

Secondly, eg. the “Custom markup language” the authors introduce in chapter 6 is something, I’d expect from schoolkids but not from somebody who does not hesitate to call his product professional. It’s not only terribly half baked and a promissing maintenance nightmare, but it also takes up so much space in the book, that authors could be able to introduce some basic techniques of XML parsing in PHP and explain it’s advantages over the ugliness they have provided the reades with. That section among other things gives me clear picture of the “professionality” of the book.

Chapter 7 + 8 – again using PHP4 object model – c’mon, we are in 2007…

Let’s say that CH3..CH5 are “OK”, the rest is something, that in my opinion does only fills space in the book and readers would be better off searching the approprite information on the internet, where the book points you anyway in the end.

After reading “Professional SEO in PHP”, I’ve for good understood what Joel Spolsky ment when he claimed that you can never learn a technology from a book in red cover with mughshots, however professional it claim to be, because there’s no overall intelligence behind it, chapters repeat things and left things out, and in rush to get the book to the market, editing appears to be non-existent.

5 Stars The best book I’ve seen on the subject.
I’ve read a number of other resources on the subject of SEO, and this one is definitely the best I’ve encountered.

No one aspect of SEO is particularly technically complicated, its more just a matter of being aware of all the areas in which you can help (or more likely, not hurt) yourself. This book does a very thorough job of covering all of these areas, and is clear and concise when it comes to describing specific tactics and the underlying mechanisms that make them effective.

Also, as mentioned by another reviewer, this book can be a valuable resource to a non-programmer because of how clearly it explains all of the tactics it covers and how involved the case studies in it are.

5 Stars Excellent book for developers
When I first started making web sites, I thought that a good title, a few META tags, and some relevant content would achieve a high ranking on a search engine. That era is long gone and has been replaced with buzzwords like PageRank and other arcane algorithms.

This book has been extremely helpful at demystifying what a modern webmaster needs to do to obtain the best possible rankings. For me especially, the focus that this be used by an already-competent PHP developer was a strong selling point. It was also laden with many real-world examples that could be immediately used.

The early chapters in the book really go into depth about the common problems in SEO and some simple things to do alongside many of the tools already available to the developer such as Google analytics and mod_rewrite. The latter part of the book delves into the more esoteric techniques that many only apply to a smaller portion of sites, but it is useful nonetheless.

Even for someone with basic familiarity with SEO will find the explanations useful. The chapters on duplicate content and SEO-friendly JavaScript are great examples of helping people unfamiliar with SEO to avoid the most common pitfalls of site design.

Overall, this is an excellent book for anyone who wants the Swiss army knife of SEO techniques.

5 Stars Amazing book
This book was perfect. I came from no knowlage of seo to fully understanding it. I bought this and Search Engine Optimization an hour a day together, and as good as the other book was, this one blew it away. I had read this one first, and it seemed like everything was just an echo reading the other book, but this one has even more because it shows you the programming aspect.

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