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by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie, Wrox, April 2007

The book is now available at the following online stores: (you can also check local store availability by zip code)

Search engine optimization is not only the job of the marketing department. It must be considered from a web site's inception and throughout its lifetime by the web site developer. Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP provides developers with the information they need to create and maintain a search engine friendly web site, and avoid common pitfalls that confuse search engine spiders. The book discusses in depth how to to facilitate site spidering, and discusses the various technologies and services that can be leveraged for site promotion.

Written for the PHP developer or tech-savvy marketer, this unique reference provides techniques for creating and maintaining web sites optimized for search engines. You'll discover how to facilitate the indexing of your site, as well as how to leverage specific technologies and services for site promotion. You will understand the role of web site architecture in search engine optimization and explore various topics therein. Knowing this will help you to develop a site that achieves great search engine rankings. Finally, you'll apply this knowledge by creating a sample e-commerce catalog and an optimized WordPress blog.

Who are You?

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.

Web developers are directly involved in the search engine marketing process. To rank well in these organic results, it may not be enough to “write relevant content,” as your typical search engine marketing tutorial drones. Rather, the web application developer must work together with the marketing team, and he or she must build a web site fully aware that certain features or technologies may interfere with a search engine marketing campaign. An improperly designed web site can interfere with a search engine’s need to periodically navigate and index the information contained therein. In the worst case, the search engine may not be able to index the content at all.

The raison d’etre 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.  

Table Of Contents:

1. You: Programmer and Search Engine Marketer.

2. A Primer in Basic SEO.

3. Provocative SE-Friendly URLs.

4. Content Relocation and HTTP Status Codes.

5. Duplicate Content.

6. SE-Friendly HTML and JavaScript.

7. Web Feeds and Social Bookmarking.

8. Black Hat SEO.

9. Sitemaps.

10. Link Bait.

11. IP Cloaking, Geo-Targeting, and IP Delivery.

12. Foreign Language SEO.

13. Coping with Technical Issues.

14. Case Study: Building an e-Commerce Catalog.

15. Site Clinic: So You Have a Web Site?

16. WordPress: Creating a SE-Friendly Blog.

Appendix A. Simple Regular Expressions.

Glossary.

Index.

SEO Book Resources:

Errata for 1st Printing (coming soon)
Code Download
Free Chapter (chapter 1)