This was an exciting week because I received my review copy of Search Engine Optimization With PHP by Jaimie Sirovich and Christian Darie. SEO Egghead (aka Jaimie Sirovich) mentioned a couple of months ago that he wanted to hear from people who were interested in reviewing the book, so I immediately sent him my request. And I was super happy to receive the book shaped package in my mailbox from the USA as he mentioned that the publisher may not dispatch overseas.

Anyway, the book gets a big thumbs up from me. I could not have arrived at a better time as I was needing to do some SEO friendly URL rewriting in the .htaccess file. There is a whole chapter devoted to this and it managed to turn a previously seemingly impossible to learn task into something that took me just 15 minutes to implement. I think I’m starting to get regular expressions sorted out too thanks to the book.

So far I have got through the following chapters:

• Provocative SE Friendly URLs – Very handy explanation of how to implement dynamic URL rewriting with regular expressions and htaccess – and I started implementing these straight out of the book.
• Duplicate Content – Very handy information on how to avoid it. If you are implementing database driven website, then you really need to take a good look at whether you are creating duplicate content.
• Black Hat SEO – I always like reading about Black Hat SEO. However, this chapter is more about how to avoid it or fall victim to it. However, How-not-to-do-it guides are often the most informative
• Link Bait – This is really cool if you are a PHP programmer and not a master copywriter. Most of the resources I have read about link bait involve being creative with your pen. This has useful tips about how you can create some cool stuff with PHP to attract the link love.
• Cloaking, Geo-Targeting, and IP Delivery – Another great chapter on what is sometimes considered part of the dark arts. Including lots of useful code to get started.
• Simple Regular Expressions – This is actually an appendix to the book, but very handy none-the-less.

That probably covers just 1/4 of the book.

If you are a PHP programmer and are wanting to develop SE friendly websites, then you should really consider getting this book.

One thing that would have been handy is a disk with the source code for the extensive coding examples in the book. I’m not sure if this is because mine is a review copy so was not shipped with a CD. I’ll dig around and see what I can find.

Get Search Engine Optimization With PHP here.