I’ve recently been reading a book, yes a real book, about search engine optimization and PHP. It’s a great overview on a handful of things you can do to optimize your PHP website.

It’s from Jamie Sirovich and Christian Darie over at SEO Egghead and is written programmer to programmer. If you don’t have a handle on PHP, then this book is probably not for you. But if you have some programming skills and want to learn more about SEO, I highly recommend this book.

Chapter 16 is all about optimizing Wordpress for search engines. It walks you though the install and gives practical tips, code snipits and plugin recommendations to help any Wordpress blog become a bit more search engine friendly.

Some blog related topics include permalinks, social bookmarking, feed buttons, emailing blog posts, XML sitemaps integration and duplicate content issues.

Other topics throughout the book include basic SEO, link bait, black hat SEO, geo-targeting and much more. I did learn a few cool tricks and will keep the book handy for future projects.

I really enjoyed the book and have recommended it to some of my friends. If you have some PHP programming skills and want to learn more about search engine optimization, than I highly recommend Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP.

The SEO Title tag is a plugin that I’ve known about for a while, but never messed with. Boy was I missing out.

What SEO Title Tag does is add the ability to customize your blog’s title tags per post. No longer are they tied directly to the post title. You can customize almost any title tag across your blog giving your site a possible edge in search engines.

One can customize individual posts, categories or pages. The default Wordpress title tags are OK, Optimal Title makes them better, SEO Title Tag makes them into whatever you want them to be.

There is also the ability to customize the separator, create a shot blog name to show on post pages, remove the blog name from post pages, use category descriptions as titles on category pages and tie the Title tags into UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior).

Title tags are easy to customize too. They can be mass customized though the plugin options under the Manage tab or you can also create the titles as you create your post as it adds a custom ‘Title Tag’ field to the post screen.