Review by Inius Mella for SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible
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The first thing you should read in this book is the author’s bio on the back cover. You’ll discover that her expertise is freelance business writing, not SEO. That will go a long way in explaining why her book just skims the surface of this complex subject and will provide you with precious little information you can actually use. This book has lots of words, but very little expertise and no depth.

Her discussion of meta tags, title tags, and meta name descriptions, for example, goes no further than explaining what a meta tag looks like. She writes, “Such a tag for the search engine optimization page might look like this:” She then shows us an example…and then moves on to other subjects. There is no in-depth discussion of how to write these critically important tags, how to use or not use keywords or keyword phrases in these tags, no discusses relating to keyword denisty or character length in meta tags or practical example of how sucessful meta tags are written. All you’ll be given is an example of what a meta tag looks like. And that’s why this book can be described in one word — shallow.

If you need a bigger clue, this “expert” in SEO has not created any website or blog for her book. Try Googling “SEO Bible” and see what you get. It won’t be her book. Sure, there’s a page ranking compliments of Amazon.com. But that wasn’t her doing. She hasn’t even created anything TO optimize. This person probably knows a lot about research and writing — but knows very little about SEO. Don’t be sucked in by the title. This book is not worth it.

Review by Joann Attison for SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible
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I can see already that I’m going to get good use out of this book.

Although this books starts off with what would be considered a “history of the web search engine”, it goes on to explain every nuance of SEO technology.

I love this book because it does explain everything you need to understand in order to advertise your webpage. Very technical, in plain language. The only thing the book may be lacking is any glitzy business advice as to HOW to get the best results.

So really, the information in this book covers all the ground work to the process of internet advertising. A practical, comprehensive guide to how your webpage gets noticed. I’m glad to have it in my library for reference.

Review by Diane Cipollo for Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO
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Creating a website that can be found among all the other sites on the web has always been important to the success of any site. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is as important to the marketing of a website as image optimization is to its graphic design. For dynamic-driven websites such as BellaOnline, it is a continuous challenge to maintain search engine optimization. This book by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie is written for the PHP programmer who needs to understand the many technical issues involved when programming a search-engine-friendly site from attracting search engine spiders to site promotion. Throughout the book, you will find code examples and practice exercises which show how to implement the techniques covered in the book.

The authors begin with a discussion of the programming environment including setting up the MySQL server and then move on to tools and resources for the IT professional and the basics of search engine optimization. One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the URL. The URLs that you generate for your pages must not only be search engine friendly but also people friendly. The authors discuss how to make the task of creating and managing search-engine-friendly URLs easier. Another problem you will encounter is duplicate content which will harm your site’s search engine rating. The authors discuss many ways to prevent or minimize this problem such as using robots.txt and meta exclusion.

Your site visitors enjoy those cool looking interactive features, such as fancy menus, that can be created using JavaScript, Ajax and Flash. These same features make it difficult for search engines to find your site. However, web readers have come to expect a certain amount of interactivity and without at least a few of these goodies, your site will be bland by today’s standards. The authors discuss this problem and cover several ways to help such as generating SEO images and the use of graphic text.

One of the most popular ways to promote a website is with RSS feeds and syndication. To be effective, these feeds must be updated as new content is added to your site. This can be time consuming especially if your site is updated several times a minute. Two answers to this problem offered by the authors are to automate the generation of RSS feeds with a PHP class and displaying feeds with SimplePie.

A standard for a good search engine friendly site is a good sitemap system. As with RSS feeds, keeping a sitemap updated can be a challenge and the authors show you how to create a traditional and an XML-based sitemap. Once your site is live, your job as an IT professional has just begun. There are many SEO technical issues the authors touch on including maintaining your site, changing hosts and cross linking.

One thing that makes a technical-heavy book like this more helpful is a working example that incorporates what you have learned. The case study for this book is an E-commerce store and catalog. The authors have also covered how to enhance a pre-existing site to be more search engine friendly and how to create a search engine optimized blog using WordPress.

Jaimie Sirovich is a search engine marketing consultant, programmer and administrator for the search engine marketing blog SEOEgghead. Cristian Darie is a software engineer and author of several books and tutorials on AJAX, ASP.NET, PHP and SQL. [...]

Review by Mark Stoecker for Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO
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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.

Review by Vaclav Sigmund for Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO
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I’ve read through this book from first to last page in a hope of finding any valuable information and must say, that most of what the book suggests is of no value to any professional in field. It’s begins with some general giberrish about SEO, which is of no real value and can be collected over the web within hour. Then follow some worn out URI rewriting recipes, which I would be ashamed of offering as an solution to any of my clients and call them “SEO”. Then ending chapters again are some general giberish, not a dime better that what can be found on web for free.

If the title read “Beginning SEO with PHP”, that would be somehow acceptable and the content would be OK, but there is nothing “Professional” in this book.

Firstly, going with PHP4 for your examples in 2007 is a little bit um… “anachronous”.

Secondly, eg. the “Custom markup language” the authors introduce in chapter 6 is something, I’d expect from schoolkids but not from somebody who does not hesitate to call his product professional. It’s not only terribly half baked and a promissing maintenance nightmare, but it also takes up so much space in the book, that authors could be able to introduce some basic techniques of XML parsing in PHP and explain it’s advantages over the ugliness they have provided the reades with. That section among other things gives me clear picture of the “professionality” of the book.

Chapter 7 + 8 – again using PHP4 object model – c’mon, we are in 2007…

Let’s say that CH3..CH5 are “OK”, the rest is something, that in my opinion does only fills space in the book and readers would be better off searching the approprite information on the internet, where the book points you anyway in the end.

After reading “Professional SEO in PHP”, I’ve for good understood what Joel Spolsky ment when he claimed that you can never learn a technology from a book in red cover with mughshots, however professional it claim to be, because there’s no overall intelligence behind it, chapters repeat things and left things out, and in rush to get the book to the market, editing appears to be non-existent.