Optimizing for Web (Google) search engines

[jsw_nz]

I wanted to put this out there, in that the question came up in discussion. Apart from meta tags in the page template headers, what strategies can be employed to offer a given client assurances that his/her web site is optimized for web search engines. Wanted to ask how robots, etc index a given site done in phpwcms.

cheers from new zealand,

jsw_nz

[frold]

eg. use the rewrite function

[Jan212]

frold said it... i think we'll have to enhance the char limit of the keywords box

[Oliver Georgi]

@Frold: it makes no sense to enhance the keyword box - most search engines only have a look at first 15 keywords.

If there is no content in your document it will have no relevance how many keywords you will in. Most important thing is the page title - in my eyes - and real content.

Fill in the description for the structure level too. And you can use custom meta tags in template's header.

Oliver

[jsw_nz]

I have seen a lot of discussion about the rewrite function, so I will install RC3 and give it a go myself. I also discovered leaving out keywords in page templates and including them at the article level works. Very nice! I had several other questions however (which may seem trite).

With regards to page titles, the option to leave page title blank in page layout allows templates to be used site wide in a number of different categories.

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page title in page layout (left blank) | category name (About Us) | article name (A Look at Our History)

would yield this page title:

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About Us | A Look at Our History

1.) In your estimation is this an acceptable strategy. 2.) Does the appearance of the " | " in the concatenation of category and article name present any search engine problems?

2.) Do you suggest, as a general recommendation, using Dublin Core custom metatags?

3.) I still have yet to figure out the role of the category infotext entry in the site structure dialogue. Is this for site searching?

cheers,
jsw

[alwaysLearning]

Hi JSW

I run a phpwcms site using mod_rewrite where all pages are very happily indexed by Google and my page titles include the "|" pipe between the title components. In fact Google displays these included in the title link it shows, which would seem to indicate the big G has no worries with it whatsoever.

What Oliver says is exactly right (no suprise there, the creator of this CMS would HAVE to be a very clever guy! ) - Google will mainly (with the current algorithm anyway) provide weight to the page title and page content ... spamming with too many keywords in the keywrod meta tag will likely not help or hinder any efforts with google. I use 3-5 words in the keywords related to the title and content.

I don't use Dublin core metadata and that has no effect on success of my site in Google.

Hope that helps. Just my opinion based on visual review of my results in Google

Best
Carl
(Australia) - so this is now an ANZAC post

[jsw_nz]

Thanks for the pointers.

Unlike others the on the boards this rewrite function seems not to be working for me. Thought you might point me in the right direction. What is happening is that the clicking on a given aliased link yields a 404 error, which suggests that I have not changed the httpd.conf in Apache correctly. When I boot my index file the first page displays correctly:

...localhost/phpwcms/index.php?id=0,15,0,0,1,0

Then when I click another link (aliased) I get a Missing Page 404 error with the address bar reading:

...localhost/phpwcms/about_us.shtml

(1) I have RC4 with the correct function url_search($query) in place
(2) Turned rewrite function on in the conf.inc.php
(3) Have the following settings in my .htaccess file:

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php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off
php_flag register_globals Off
RewriteEngine On

# maybe you need this
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php 

RewriteBase /phpwcms
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)\.shtml$ /phpwcms/index.php?id=$1.$2.$3.$4.$5.$6
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.shtml$ /phpwcms/index.php?$1

(4) The last setting in apache (2.0.49) is a litltle confusion to me. and is something of a Catch22:

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Options Indexes FollowSymLinks (line 267)

Will boot the login and then lead to the error on the first clicked link/next page as described above. If on the otherhand I edit the httpd.conf file:

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Options Indexes FollowSymLinks (line 267)
AllowOverride All (line 274) 

....I get an internal server error thrown and cannot login.


The error log READS:
[Tue May 11 12:46:11 2004] [alert] [client 127.0.0.1] C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache2/htdocs/phpwcms/.htaccess: Invalid command 'php_flag', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

Not sure what to make of it, other than it is throwing an error on the first line it encounters in the .htaccess file. Considerably perplexed with this Apache related problem.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
I am working off my own localhost installation...........

Cheers, jsw

[Oliver Georgi]

Try to disable first 2 lines:

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#php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off 
#php_flag register_globals Off 

Seems that you have no rights for php_flag.

But it's not neccessary for the ReWrite.

Oliver

[jsw_nz]

Thank you very meuch for taking the time to answer my post. I did as you suggested, yet when I attempt to login, Apache still throws an error. The error log reads:

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[Tue May 11 19:25:14 2004] [alert] [client 127.0.0.1] C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache2/htdocs/phpwcms/.htaccess: Invalid command 'RewriteEngine', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

So as best as I can determine, Apache is throwing an error on any line it encounters in the .htaccess file. I have my hppd.conf file looking like this:

Code: Select all

<Directory "C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache2/htdocs">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

I am new to Apache, making it difficult to troubleshoot. Thinking that this is likely a simple setting I am overlooking.

cheers,
jsw

[Oliver Georgi]

you need to have a line such this too without leading #:

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LoadModule rewrite_module     /usr/lib/apache/mod_rewrite.so

Oliver

[jsw_nz]

I was wondering about the dso modules. I uncommented this line (windows version):

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LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Still am experiencing the error during booting login.php with both:

# php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off
# php_flag register_globals Off
RewriteEngine On

error: ....Apache2/htdocs/phpwcms/.htaccess: RewriteLogLevel not allowed here. And here:

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off
php_flag register_globals Off
RewriteEngine On

error: Apache2/htdocs/phpwcms/.htaccess: Invalid command 'php_flag'

Thanks for your help, still struggling to understand this....

cheers

[jsw_nz]

OK, I got it to work.

I will say the Apache side to this is quite subtle.

I commented out both:
# php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off
# php_flag register_globals Off

and
# RewriteLogLevel 3

Apparently the RewriteLogLevel was throwing an error based on my Apache install. Thanks much for your help Oliver. I only wish I understood in greater detail why my install is behaving like this.

For some reason is does not like the php_flags commands or the RewriteLog command?

at the end of the day however, if it works, don't fix it. Cheers.

Looking forward to the end of the month with your new template structure!

jsw

[jsw_nz]

This might sound like a stupid question. It regards the index. Since I am working locally, I tried deleting all parameters from the address bar..taking me to the index.php that now exists. It stated:

This is the default index page. Delete this page to be redirected automatically to index.php

My question related to final production and my confusion over what will constitute my final index page, from the perspective of the structure levels and the article center.

(1) In the article center the top category is: index (website start). I have added a first article category, then a second below it. At the end of the day, what will be the default index? Will it be the first artcle entered directly below the index (website start) line?

(2) I have gotten the rewrite to work, but when I view the first page below that (website start) line, it shows this:

http://localhost/phpwcms2/index.php?id=1,1,0,0,1,0

Only after a second click on a given link does the rewrite take place. Is there a way the the rewrite function can be invoked on the first click. Do I have to put Indexes next to FollowsymLinks in my apache httpd.conf file?

I admit I am new to this, so i ask the question for clarification.

Cheers, jsw

[rk]

http://localhost/phpwcms2/index.php?id=1,1,0,0,1,0

Nice try

[jsw_nz]

Any clarification would be appreciated....