Desert Web Designs Blog

This is the first of many book reviews coming from me. I feel that in the industry I’m in, the learning never stops. The web is a constantly changing place and in order to stay competitive, one must stay current (or as current as possible) in all facets of the web and wear as many hat’s as possible. I have a large, and ever-growing, library of what my wife affectionately calls my “nerd books” So be it. I’m fine with that designation. Many of these books I’ve read, and obviously the ones I havn’t, I plan to. Keep in touch to read more of my book reviews and recommendations ranging from SEO to PHP, CSS to Ajax, and more.

Book Review for:

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

by Jaimie Sirovich & Christian Darie

A quick note about this review. This review was written approximately a year ago when I was still new to, and learning, PHP and SEO. I am posting it here now as I am starting a new Book Reviews category for this blog.

I am still somewhat new to PHP and this was my first book I’ve read on SEO. However, this book was packed full of great information for programmers. I never realized that there’s so much that can be done from a architectural standpoint for SEO. I will definitely be referring back to this book on a regular basis in my future web developments.

One thing to keep in mind, this book is not for search engine marketer’s. Although the authors do explain the reason behind the methods they provide, about half of this book is PHP code. This book is designed for improving ranking during development and design of the website, and not after publication. I learned that there are two facets to SEO; the architecture and design of the site and the marketing of the site. This book addresses the former.

The only thing that kept me from giving this book 5 stars is that the book was primarily geared towards an e-commerce site with a majority of the examples directed as such. Now, most e-commerce sites do implement PHP, there are plenty of other sites that implement it as well that do are not e-commerce. I understand that SEO is relatively easier on these sites, but there are plenty of methods and examples that can be implemented on any site, not just e-commerce such as; URL Rewriting via mod_rewrite, 301 redirects, duplicate content, sitemaps, link bait, and more.

Overall, still a great book and well worth the price and the read. I will definitely looking for more titles from these authors.

P.S. Author Jaimie Sirovich has a tremendous SEO Blog site that while reading this book quickly became one of my favorite sites.

Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Wrox (April 16, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0470100923
ISBN-13: 978-0470100929

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 1:08 am and is filed under Book Reviews, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.