Search Engine Optimization with PHP
"Make Money with SEO", "Be #1 in Google SEPR", "SEO riches", "Google's best kept secret", "High Rankings, Fast!"... this could go on and on. There are an abundance of infomercial-type sites and ebooks out there promising you SEO miracles, as if there's some mystical secret to success and you can learn it today for just $79.99 and be rich tomorrow morning. Luckily, "SEO with PHP" is not one of these books.
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science (some even dare say it's an art), because search engines don't want to disclose all their algorithms and open themselves for abuse. This fuzzy definition of the SEO area helps con artists step up and promise you wonders. And people buy into these, because people want these wonders to be true. The same way people buy into the next fad diet out there that reveals "the secret". The truth is, there is no secret, everything is pretty simple (don't eat crap, move more), but requires your attention for a little more than a day or two. The same with SEO, there are no secret shortcuts, just some concepts to have in mind when building a website and some amount of work you need to do. True, sometimes you might achieve temporary results by tricking the search engines (or your body) but those tricks will work against you in the long run.
Search engine optimization consists of a number of rules and best practices that every site should follow and implement, such as SE-friendly URLs, keywords, headings, titles, etc. "SEO with PHP" gives you a comprehensive overview of the rules and the ways to implement those rules. I think every developer who cares about his work should know about the core SEO concepts and keep them in mind while coding a website. This book is the right guide, if you're new to SEO or you don't have systematic knowledge. The book's main audience is developers, as there are quite a few code examples, server setup and so on, but it can also be read by non-technical folks - business people and designers, who can simply skip the code parts.
Important topics you'll master after reading this book include:
- how search engines "see" your page
- page rank
- internal in-page as well as external factors that help your page rank
- keyword research
- link bait
- friendly URLs, including server setup
- duplicate content and how to avoid
- black hat SEO and how to stay away and protect from it
- building sitemaps to "feed" content to the engines
- geo-targeting
- SE-friendly JavaScript/Ajax/HTML
A nice touch is the last chapter which shows you an approach to making your SE-friendly WordPress blog. WordPress as a pretty popular tool that many people are familiar with, so instead of making up a site, the book puts the concepts into practice by using an example that is close to most readers. Another "extra" is the regular expression appendix that can teach you to be really creative with the URL rewrites, although the book has enough examples of friendly URL rewrites to get you started.
The beauty of the true SEO is that it's not counter-intuitive, it's not about stuffing a bunch of keywords colored as the background or tricking the engines with meta tags. The true SEO overlaps with human-friendliness (design for human visitors while keeping search engine robots in mind"), accessibility (e.g. providing an HTML only version of a complex interactive JavaScript site), standards-compliance (e.g. using CSS for layout, not tables) and even page-load performance.
More about the book
- Title: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO
- Authors: Jaimie Sirovich, Cristian Darie
- Publisher: Wrox
- Sample chapter: chapter 1 (pdf)
- Code download: zip
- In authors' own words: Jaimie presenting the book, Cristian on Amazon, Cristian's book page
Buy the book
Tags: cristian darie, jaimie sirovich, php, seo, wrox
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