“Left Brain” Book Review: Professional Search Engine Optimization with…

Gradiva Couzin, our resident “left brain” SEO, takes a read on Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie.

I was very aware, when Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP arrived on my doorstep, that I reside somewhere in the fringe of their target audience. Written by a computer programmer-turned-search-engine-marketer (Jaimie Sirovich) and software engineer (Cristian Darie), this book should prove very satisfying to “left brain” readers looking for a book that gets down and dirty in the code.

What’s exciting about this book is that it covers some of the important, and often-overlooked, technical aspects of SEO that can stop a website dead in its tracks before it even gets a chance to rise up the search engine ranks.  Of particular interest to me: duplicate content, problems with Javascript, AJAX, and Flash, web feeds and social bookmarking, and search-engine-friendly URLs. The book touches on every red flag I’m aware of, explaining with a minimum of fluff how to solve the problems, and offering “roll-up-your-sleeves” exercises to help programmers learn how best to tackle technical challenges in SEO.

While there is a less-technical introductory discussion in each chapter, the marketing, research, and strategy side of SEO is not explored deeply.  In Chapter 2: A Primer in Basic SEO, the authors offer a short introduction to SEO fundamentals that touches on the major considerations of SEO. A programmer who wants to understand what marketers are talking about, but probably isn’t going to be the person implementing those elements of SEO, will appreciate the no-frills approach.  Non-programmers would do well to couple this book with a less technical introduction to SEO such as our book.

Here are a few examples of people who should run, not walk, to order this book:

• Web developers who want to expand their knowledge base to include SEO
• Programmers who have been tasked with building a “search friendly” website and want to make sure all technical bases are covered
• Marketers with some tech skill or interest, who want to be able to speak intelligently to their programmers
• Advanced SEOs who need a good handle on technical aspects of the service

And one last group that should buy this book:  Marketers who want to skim it and then walk it down to the IT department and hand it off to the web development team.

This is a highly recommended read, especially if seeing “$qs_array[urldecode($pair[0])] = urldecode($pair[1]); ” in a book doesn’t freak you out.