Most websites are developed without SEO in mind. They are often developed by teams that have a very deep knowledge and understanding about programming websites and applications, databases and also general business and e-commerce. A large (if not the most) number of those teams only have little or no knowledge of SEO at all. The result is a website that might violates some of the very basic rules of creating a site that is well accessible and understandable for the human visitors as well as the non-human visitors (the search engine spiders or crawlers).

Changing a site after it is live and around for a while, when somebody realizes that search engine traffic is not the way it should be, can be very costly and in the worst cases may be even require an almost entire rewrite of the website code.

That’s why is it important that not only marketers are being educated about the benefits and principles of search engine optimization, but the people that build websites as well. Who builds websites? Web developers. This book was written exactly for this audience, but also a SEO who knows most of the information to SEO provided in the book could benefit from this book. It includes a lot of very practical .NET sample source code for ready to use tools that can help marketers in their daily routine.

Although a lot of the content is not .NET specific are other parts that are using a lot of sample source code to demonstrate possible solutions, specific for Microsoft IIS and the .NET Framework. If you are a PHP developer, check out the sister book of this one (Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO), which is geared towards PHP, Apache Webserver and MySQL web developers.
Rating: 5 / 5

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Ok, so this is the second book I’ve got from Wrox for reviewing (and yes, I did enjoy it much more than the first). SEO is one of those things that most developers end up forgetting when building ASP.NET pages Unfortunately, that might cost you a lot. This books presents several principles and ideas that will help you improve your site’s indexing. The structure is clean and the content is good.

Now, the bad things: I didn’t really liked the C# code style presented throughout the book and I think that some of the ideas were “duplicated” in several chapters. The text gives lots of emphasis on Google (which one can understand, since it rules the search engine market). I’m not against it but I’d like to see more about the other search engines too. Overall, I’m going to give it a 7.5/10.
Rating: 4 / 5

Every professional web developer at some point of time has to confront the ruthless reality – SEO. There are variety of reasons of why it is happening but the most common one is that customers don’t just need greatly functional websites; they need greatly findable (“spiderable” is industry term) websites along with great functionality.

So whoever hoped to stick to cozy world of coding are pushed out from zone of comfort. SEO can be interesting, even exciting sometimes, but never cozy. It is like Wild West of the olden days with sheriffs (Google, Bing etc), bandits (spammers, phishers etc) and constant gold rush to get your site at the very top of the very first search results page.

To navigate well and, most importantly, satisfy your customers with sensible SEO results a web developer have to peruse astronomical amount of information, chaotically scattered across endless cyberspace. This book is a good, if not perfect, starting point to begin SEO experience.

Although sample code is in C#, it is simple enough to be understood by VB.NET developers. There is a good coverage on URL Rewriters, topic is not widely known but relatively easy to manage for anybody who worked a little bit with Regular Expressions. Chapter on Black Hat SEO is also quite useful, especially for those who involved in development of blogs. Pretty much all major parameters for proper SEO can be found in the books but they could be structured better – I had to develop my own checklist. Importance of 301 Redirection is stressed out quite well.

Something can be highlighted better, namely issues related to shared hosting. It is a topic on its own and there are some problems with that that can not be solved easily.

By the way authors are quite helpful and willing to assist if something is not entirely transparent with the code supplied with the book. Code can be downloaded from WROX website; it is OK for most part, with occasional not too severe flaws.

SEO can be pretty scary at the very beginning. That should be seen in positive light though. It may sound ridiculous but SEOing does improve mental resilience in dealing with vast quantities of loosely related data. Having this book in your arsenal can make that trait even better.
Rating: 4 / 5