Re: PHP and SEO Workarounds

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On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 12:15 -0500, Gautam Bhatia wrote:

> hey folks,
> This is in regards to SEO and PHP, From what i have
> read , most (Not all) the PHP Contents is dynamic , which makes it so
> powerfull , but it also means that chances of it being indexed in search
> engines are less , am i right in saying this ? . If so how do i optimize
> my site for search engines which is being powered by PHP and content is
> Dynamic. Please guide in this regard. Thank you.
>
> Regards,
> Gautam Bhatia
> mail2gautambhatia@gmail.com


This is a point you'll see mentioned by most SEO 'experts' none of whom
I've seen can provide any evidence of this. Just think about the last
time you searched for the answer to a question online. I'd hazard a
guess that the most popular results had dynamic URL's such as forum
posts, etc.

While it is true that the URL of a page has some weight to the pages
ranking, it's miniscule compared to the actual content of the page.
There might be an issue with blogs though, the ones where new old posts
get pushed to other pages. So a story that appears on blog.php?page=1
might tomorrow appear on page=2, and then page=3 the day after. If you
have a setup like this, then you could benefit from making more static
type links for the posts, like Wordpress does.

More important for your SEO is getting the content correctly marked up,
i.e. headings in tags, alt text for images, etc. There's a good
tool for checking these sorts of things at http://nibbler.silktide.com

Thanks,
Ash
http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk



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Re: PHP and SEO Workarounds

Look into using your web server's mod_rewrite functionality to alter the
URL that the search engines see. For an example, look at Wordpress'
permalinks or Joomla's SEF (search engine friendly) URLs.

What this will do is make all your dynamic pages look more like static
ones. If all your PHP pages had unique names like "about.php" and
"ourmission.php", then the file name sort of lends itself to SEO already,
but that would be a pretty boring website, and probably one that doesn't
need PHP, if that was the case.

The big issue are pages that take parameters:

domain.com/catalog.php?catid=55&prodid=23

You could turn this into:

domain.com/catalog/55/23

But that's still not very semantic and doesn't give search engines much to
work with. So you can massage it even further with something like:

domain.com/catalog/23_Footware/55_Happy_Bunny_Slippers

Kind of ugly, but you can use mod_rewrite to turn that into:
domain.com/catalog.php?catid=23_Footware&prodid=55_Happy_Bun ny_Sliippers
then use PHP to extract the 23 and 55 to display the proper data.

Depending on the variables you're passing, you could exclude the numbers
(which do nothing for SEO) and use PHP to figure out what to display.

domain.com/catalog/Footware/Happy_Bunny_Slippers
or...
domain.com/Footware/Happy_Bunny_Slippers (shorter URLs are favored by SEO
as not having "too much information" and some search engines only looking
at the first XX characters of the URL means that the shorter the URL, the
more info you can pack into it).

With mod_rewrite, you can tell it to check to see if a file exists, and if
it doesn't, process a more complicated rewrite.

So if the catalog is your main source of dynamic data, then you could leave
the "catalog" part out and use the
domain.com/Footware/Happy_Bunny_Slippers format. If you had other
dynamic data, you could leave the catalog in as a clue for the
mod_rewrite as to what PHP script to use to process the rest of the
parameters.


Another thing you can do is use the canonical tag to indicate which pages
are duplicates. You may not think you have duplicates, but a common
example would be if you have a page, then you have the same page that's
just sorted differently. Or if you had a "print friendly" version of a
page without menus and such. The content is essentially the same (which
search engines will see and think you're trying to stuff the ballot box
and make your site look more relevant to that subject when really you're
not). So if you have:

domain.com/catalog.php?catid=55&prodid=23
and...
domain.com/catalog.php?catid=55&prodid=23&sort=alpha
or..
domain.com/catalog.php?catid=55&prodid=23&print=1

Then you'd want to set a canonical tag at the top of each of these listings
that says:
domain.com/catalog.php?catid=55&prodid=23

(meaning that all these pages are the same as
"domain.com/catalog.php?catid=55&prodid=23")

You may be saying that pages sorted differently are different output.
True.. but it's all the same data in the end. Even with pagination.



And the biggest thing you can do for SEO isn't really even PHP related.
Have good semantic markup. Make sure it all validates and has a proper
doctype assigned. And make your content as organic and human as
possible. Don't write content for machines and search engines... don't
try to "write to keywords" by making your content all awkward by stuffing
as many keywords in as possible. The search engines are pretty smart.
Write good content and write it for humans... make it relevant to the
topic and your audience and the search engines will see that and deliver
it to your audience higher in search rankings.


There are other things, but these are some of the big ones.

-TG




----- Original Message -----
From: Gautam Bhatia
To: php-general@lists.php.net
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:15:45 -0500
Subject: [PHP] PHP and SEO Workarounds

> hey folks,
> This is in regards to SEO and PHP, From what i have
> read , most (Not all) the PHP Contents is dynamic , which makes it so
> powerfull , but it also means that chances of it being indexed in search
> engines are less , am i right in saying this ? . If so how do i optimize
> my site for search engines which is being powered by PHP and content is
> Dynamic. Please guide in this regard. Thank you.
>
> Regards,
> Gautam Bhatia
> mail2gautambhatia@gmail.com
>
>

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Re: PHP and SEO Workarounds

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On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 20:05 -0500, Gautam Bhatia wrote:

> hey guys,
> Thanks a lot everyone for the links and suggestions ,
> I will take a look into mod_rewrite and search engine friendly URL's To
> make the site more efficient ,
>
>
> Regards,
> Gautam bhatia.
> mail2gautambhatia@gmail.com
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 12:44 +0000, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 12:15 -0500, Gautam Bhatia wrote:
> >
> > > hey folks,
> > > This is in regards to SEO and PHP, From what i have
> > > read , most (Not all) the PHP Contents is dynamic , which makes it so
> > > powerfull , but it also means that chances of it being indexed in search
> > > engines are less , am i right in saying this ? . If so how do i optimize
> > > my site for search engines which is being powered by PHP and content is
> > > Dynamic. Please guide in this regard. Thank you.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Gautam Bhatia
> > > mail2gautambhatia@gmail.com
> >
> >
> > This is a point you'll see mentioned by most SEO 'experts' none of
> > whom I've seen can provide any evidence of this. Just think about the
> > last time you searched for the answer to a question online. I'd hazard
> > a guess that the most popular results had dynamic URL's such as forum
> > posts, etc.
> >
> > While it is true that the URL of a page has some weight to the pages
> > ranking, it's miniscule compared to the actual content of the page.
> > There might be an issue with blogs though, the ones where new old
> > posts get pushed to other pages. So a story that appears on
> > blog.php?page=1 might tomorrow appear on page=2, and then page=3 the
> > day after. If you have a setup like this, then you could benefit from
> > making more static type links for the posts, like Wordpress does.
> >
> > More important for your SEO is getting the content correctly marked
> > up, i.e. headings in tags, alt text for images, etc. There's a
> > good tool for checking these sorts of things at
> > http://nibbler.silktide.com
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ash
> > http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>


Just to remind you, they really aren't any more friendly to search
engines, that's a myth. Do a search for a question and look at the URLs
of the results and you'll see for yourself.

Thanks,
Ash
http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk



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PHP and SEO Workarounds

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hey folks,
This is in regards to SEO and PHP, From what i have
read , most (Not all) the PHP Contents is dynamic , which makes it so
powerfull , but it also means that chances of it being indexed in search
engines are less , am i right in saying this ? . If so how do i optimize
my site for search engines which is being powered by PHP and content is
Dynamic. Please guide in this regard. Thank you.

Regards,
Gautam Bhatia
mail2gautambhatia@gmail.com

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Re: PHP and SEO Workarounds

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Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

hey guys,
Thanks a lot everyone for the links and suggestions ,
I will take a look into mod_rewrite and search engine friendly URL's To
make the site more efficient ,


Regards,
Gautam bhatia.
mail2gautambhatia@gmail.com




On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 12:44 +0000, Ashley Sheridan wrote:

> On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 12:15 -0500, Gautam Bhatia wrote:
>
> > hey folks,
> > This is in regards to SEO and PHP, From what i have
> > read , most (Not all) the PHP Contents is dynamic , which makes it so
> > powerfull , but it also means that chances of it being indexed in search
> > engines are less , am i right in saying this ? . If so how do i optimize
> > my site for search engines which is being powered by PHP and content is
> > Dynamic. Please guide in this regard. Thank you.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Gautam Bhatia
> > mail2gautambhatia@gmail.com
>
>
> This is a point you'll see mentioned by most SEO 'experts' none of
> whom I've seen can provide any evidence of this. Just think about the
> last time you searched for the answer to a question online. I'd hazard
> a guess that the most popular results had dynamic URL's such as forum
> posts, etc.
>
> While it is true that the URL of a page has some weight to the pages
> ranking, it's miniscule compared to the actual content of the page.
> There might be an issue with blogs though, the ones where new old
> posts get pushed to other pages. So a story that appears on
> blog.php?page=1 might tomorrow appear on page=2, and then page=3 the
> day after. If you have a setup like this, then you could benefit from
> making more static type links for the posts, like Wordpress does.
>
> More important for your SEO is getting the content correctly marked
> up, i.e. headings in tags, alt text for images, etc. There's a
> good tool for checking these sorts of things at
> http://nibbler.silktide.com
>
> Thanks,
> Ash
> http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
>
>
>
>



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