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 k…
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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. [...]
Last year, I reviewed the book Ajax and PHP by Cristian Darie. Since then, he and I have kept in touch. When he asked if I would like to read his latest writing endeavor, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP, I was immediately interested. He joined Jaimie Sirovich in co-authoring this one, and they are also writing a companion version on SEO with ASP.NET. Their ASP.NET edition will be available in August of 2007. First off, here’s a bit of background info about the authors.
Jaimie Sirovich is a self-titled “SEO Egghead” and is a hybrid programmer turned search engine marketer. What makes him uniquely qualified is that he understands the tech side of SEO and isn’t just a slimey snake oil salesman who spouts off conjecture. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.
Cristian Darie is a software engineer and PhD student, currently studying distributed application architecture for his dissertation. He has published several books on a variety of web topics – including: Ajax, ASP.NET, PHP and SQL. Needless to say, he is himself quite the server-side programmer as well.
The book starts off by defining who it is written for: PHP programmers and search engine marketers. Programmers will benefit because this book talks about the factors that help improve readability of URLs for both humans and search engines. For instance, using Apache’s mod_rewrite to create:
(…)
As opposed to:
(…)
Marketers will benefit from this book because rather than rely on the myriad of disinformation that is available (leading one another in circular logic), they can start to understand things from a more concrete perspective and begin to make more accurate assessments. If it’s true that All Marketers are Liars, then at least they will sound more convincing when it comes to SEO.
Once the basics are out of the way, this book delves into more tangible code examples, showing how to use .htaccess redirects as well as HTTP responses to your advantage. They also cover the concept of cloaking, such as employed by the New York Times, allowing search engines to index their content, but not cache it. This enables them to rank high in relevant search results, but also requires a subscription to read it. Apparently, Google turns a blind eye for big business, but potentially punishes smaller sites for such practices.
They also explain how to use “white hat” methods such as IP sniffing, to make sure that international readers receive pages that are relevant to their particular locale. While not always 100% accurate, this can assist in returning pages in the correct language for a particular country or region.
Additionally, they explain how to use sitemap XML and text files to describe to Google and Yahoo, respectively, the information architecture of your site. This is helpful for sites which are inherently inaccessible due to excessive use of Flash or Ajax. While it’s certainly no substitute for semantic code, at least search engines know you have more than just an index page.
Overall, this book is great. I appreciate their description of both accepted and unethical SEO, rather than obscuring dirty “black hat” tricks. Acknowledging these methods exist is necessary in order to spot them. While I don’t go out of my way for SEO when developing a site, I certainly don’t want to knowingly or ignorantly do anything that would hinder a site’s visibility.