Climb My Way Out

When you finally sit down and start making your websites, have you taken into consideration the almighty Google? In this article, I will discuss a few important issues regarding search engine optimization.

First and foremost, I like to start with site architecture. Our primary goal here is to allow users and spiders (Google bots) to access your content easily. A few things you should include to provide easy navigation:

• Breadcrumbs
• Search box
• Logical category navigation
• Home page link
• Modified colors for visited links
• Create static links for navigation (try to avoid drop down links)
• Keep all important pages well linked from home page
• Submit a sitemap (use sitemap.org)

You will probably find all these in any half decent website. However, just because it is user friendly and logically organized it may not be Google friendly.

Let’s talk about URLs for a bit. All URLs should be descriptive and sharable, for example site.com/cake-i-like-to-eat.html instead of site.com/2j1048shh4.html.  This makes it easier for the users and the spiders to understand the content of the URL. One huge misconception that a lot webmasters believe is that URLs determine page rank. This is definitely not true, a site with site.com/blah.php?asdjf932f329j couild have a better page rank than site.com/very-nice-url.html. However it does indirectly help your page rank by making it easier for users to link to your site and easier for the spider to understand which are content rich pages. If you must use dynamically generated URLs it should be generated algorithmically understandable by the spider. Use site.com/page.php?category=sexy&person=meganfox ,not something like site.com/page.php?fdj9f9238237=fhfh18181818&3j3j299393999999=1. URLs should never use upper and lower cases together. Not only is it annoying for users that manually type it, we have to recognize that robot.txt (search engine spider’s instructions) is case sensitive.

We can use robot.txt to separate content, such as private versus public content. For example, you have a folder with all PHP files in it that only contributes to the function of the website but contains no content, you should disallow the spiders from indexing that folder. It’s also a simple security measure to disallow peepers to view folders that contain crucial files that the website depends on. We should also disallow certain URLs such as logins and shopping carts, those two things are totally unnecessary for the spiders to crawl.

Lastly, you should remove session ids attached to the ends of URLs. For example, site.com/page.php?PHPSESSID=932ik3htkh3490t323782957hf83hh2h. You do not want the search engine to index your URL with ?PHPSESSID=932ik3htkh3490t323782957hf83hh2h at the end.

There are a few methods to remove them, you can use .htaccess file and include the following:

php_flag session.use_trans_sid off
php_flag session.use_only_cookies on

Place this file in the web root of your website. However this method only prevents session ids from appearing in new content.

To remove session id from old content you can add this in your .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} PHPSESSID=.*$
RewriteRule .* %{REQUEST_URI}? [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

In addition to these two .htaccess solutions, you can modify your PHP code to get the same results.

Related posts:

1. Basic Website Building Tips