Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP is another fine Programmer to Programmer book from Wrox Press, authored by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie. As a hybrid designer/developer/marketer, I had been waiting for a book just like this for some time, and the authors deliver with concise information, expert advice and plenty of ready-to-use code that helps put your new knowledge into action immediately.

After the introductory chapter (which helps you get a development environment setup), the book launches with a primer in search engine marketing. Experienced SEMs will already have this knowledge but it's worth reading, even if it's just to make sure that you are “on the same page” with the SEO lingo that Sirovich and Darie use throughout the rest of the book. The chapter concludes with a good sampling of available SEO tools, browser plugins, forums, blogs and other resources that are worth taking a look at.

SE-Friendly URLs, redirection and HTTP status codes, duplicate content and SE-friendly code are covered in the following chapters, each providing clear examples of pitfalls to avoid, complimented by code for best practices solutions.

Social media marketing is a newer form of SEO, and while this book doesn't go into extreme depth on the subject (which is deep enough to warrant dedicated texts of its own), it does provide a solid foundation that will help you get up to speed on web feeds and social bookmarking for the purposes of promotion.

Chapter 8 covers black hat SEO—not how to do it, but how to protect against it. This thick chapter will help you learn about common black hat techniques, security best practices, dealing with comment spam, sanitizing input and CAPTCHA solutions, and how to protect your hard work from dreaded redirect attacks.

This book arrived in my hands at just the right time: I needed to create dynamic sitemaps for a static website I was optimizing. In chapter 9, the reader learns about traditional versus search engine sitemaps, and the Google, Yahoo! and the sitemaps.org sitemap standards. This isn't a thick chapter, but it contains the complete code for dynamically creating both Google and Yahoo! sitemaps, which happened to be just what I had been looking for!

The concept of link bait isn't new: create engaging, informative content and people will link to your website. With the growth of social networking however, the tools of the trade, and the nature of the game itself, have shifted somewhat. Social bookmarking (see chapter 7) via del.icio.us and digg.com is one way to promote content. Other types of link bait include informational hooks, news story hooks, humorous and fun hooks, and “evil” or controversial hooks.

The next section teaches the fundamentals of cloaking, geo-targeting, and IP delivery. Cloaking has earned a pretty nasty rap, and Google confirms that sites that use the technique may be removed from their index. There are however legitimate uses of cloaking—intent and implementation are key. Examples of legitimate use include:

• Pushing subscription-based content to spiders
• Disabling URL-based session handling for spiders

Chapter 13 covers foreign language SEO. The very thought of having to optimize a website for multiple languages can cause hair loss without the right knowledge at your disposal. But fear not though: Sirovich and Darie point the reader in the right direction with the basic tips and tricks of the trade.

The first part of the book closes with chapter 13, where you'll learn to deal with various technical issues related to SEO, including: unreliable hosting, cross-linking, SEO-aware split testing (I was pleased to see this covered) and broken links.

The second part of the book includes a case study on e-commerce SEO, a complete site clinic that uses the techniques learned in the book to optimize a website, a how-to chapter on creating an SEO-friendly WordPress website, and finally, an appendix providing a foundation in regular expressions.

Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP is a book that filled an enormous void at the time of its release, and I strongly recommend it for PHP developers* who need to address search engine marketing in their projects (these days, who doesn't?), as well as code-savvy marketers who would like to take their technical knowledge to the next level. I commend the authors for the obvious efforts they invested in this work, and am grateful to have such a complete guide to the technical side of SEO at my disposal.

*There is also an ASP-flavored version of this book.