Well I owe ol’ Jaimie Sirovich an apology. He sent me a copy of his book Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP and I told him I would give him a brutally honest review. That was about 4 months ago maybe more. I finally just got around to actually reading the book, and I’m a man of my word, so here is my review 4 months late.

I was actually quite surprised by SEO with PHP by Jaime Sirovich and Christian Darie because I was expecting another boring SEO manual. “Make sure you put keywords in your title, yada, yada, yada,” with a touch of php - ?php include(header.php)?. Note to self: never doubt Jaimie again. This book is a php toolbox for not only SEO, but for good practice web development in general. I particularly enjoyed the section about URL rewriting for search engines. Apache’s mod_rewrite module can be a beast to deal with. SEO + PHP dissects mod_rewrite with precision leaving the reader with the code needed to set up URL rewriting the proper way with ease.

The other section I enjoyed was the Blackhat SEO section. I’ve had a hard time finding any good how-to Blackhat SEO information on the internet. The authors effectively break down some heavy-duty cloaking scripts for anybody who may be interested in trying to trick the GoogleBot for good or evil.

This book is not entirely dry and excruciating to work your way through like most of the O’Reilly books I’ve read. Sirovich and Darie made it about as easy to comprehend and interesting as computer books get. I realize thats not saying a lot though.

This book really closes the gap for readers like myself who are already SEOs and know a little PHP. If you are a PHP n00b you may want to learn some basics first so you can follow the supplied scripts a little easier. The same goes for SEO. Although there is an SEO primer in the book, you may want to digest some basics first. For the moderate to advanced user this book should make a fine addition to your web development library.