These guys know what they are talking about (the picture on the cover underlines this :-). Chapters are self-contained for a technically oriented reader and loaded with concrete advice. There is also focus on the HTML side of the story, which was a pleasant surprise. We have used the recommendations in improving our SEO in our company. Recommended.

I have strong web design and (PHP) development experience but limited understanding of what makes a website more visible and also what causes a website not to be visible and the reasons behind this.

This book is great as it takes an approach for PHP users. It also helps you think about better development to consider Google, Yahoo and others "Liking You" ie: not penalizing you for something you didn't even know you were doing.

The book is best read from start to finish as it eases into many concepts that will affect your ranking in search engines by explaining how to get it right, or at least do a better job and not rely just on blind faith that your website might get hits.

If you need to get to grips with SEO as a web designer/developer or are looking to get your home web projects a little more off the ground search visibility wise, then this is a great book to start with.

Excellent especially if you work in a larger institution that has programmers and web marketing people on board. However, if you don't have any background in SEO, or anybody handling the basics of doing this for you, then you also need an 'introductory book' (the authors themselves recommend 'SEO an hour a day'. Nothing wrong with that, just don't expect to buy this book to understand basic SEO techniques.

A brilliant book.
Would not recommend it for beginners.
If you are a developer and have strong SEO basis then this is the book for you.
Really enjoyed it.

This book is worth its price just for the 'Basic Primer in SEO' chapter. It covers the whole lot without going into unnecessary technical detail. This chapter builds a solid background and enables the reader to grasp the terms used by SEO professionals who tend to be more business orientated.

The rest of the chapters go into more detail and give examples of how to optimise your code for search engines. The PHP examples are nice and simple, so any PHP developer can follow them and the more experienced developers can easily apply the simple exercises to more complicated scenarios.

The regular expressions chapter wasn't something I was expecting to find, but is something that is definitely needed as background knowledge.

I was particularly impressed how the authors of this book don't claim to know the ins and outs of how Google works. They don't try to make you believe that they have all of the answers, like some SEO experts tend to do. This honesty give me confidence in the authors' credibility. The authors give informed advice based on their experiences and direct you to other sources of information. When they don't have a definite explanation (for example, how page rank is calculated) they tell you what is the most likely answer based on the opinions of various experts. This allows the reader to form their own conclusion.

I recommend this book to PHP programmers of all abilities who are interested in any level of search engine optimisation.