SEO - help with initial steps, pls! [Archive]

GrahamB

11-30-2005, 01:17 PM

Hi everyone!

Please help me get my development "re: design for search engines" on the road.

My site is www.tangofreaks.com: just put on the web. Still in raw presentation.

I am using Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL. I have access controls and personal data in mysql. And all forum data in text files written to hard disk. I don't imagine any of this is usefull or accessible to searcgh engines.

What topics do I need to lookup and search for? What are the first steps? :eek:

Look forward to your ideas? :D

bokeh

12-06-2005, 07:02 PM

What are the first steps?The first step in SEO is page validation. Sadly yours fails (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.tangofreaks.com/qf/index.php%3Fp%3Dforum%26level%3D0%26BBS%3D00000%26sfdb%3D0%26nr%3D0) but don't worry, it only has 155 errors.

GrahamB

12-18-2005, 07:34 PM

Hi Bokeh !

Your observation are correct but very painful. Sobering. But thanks, Bokeh.

Sorry for my late reply - been following some of my own research.

My web pages are driven by php from databases. Such pages are unintelligible to search engines. I needed to know how to get round this problem and BEGIN to register my presence with Google, etc. This is what I have decided to do:
1) Create /robots.txt, disallowing everything excepting the directory /html/ (which will become a repository for html-pages to be used by search engines)
2) Keywords and Copy:
- reaserch and design keywords for the whole site; allocate keywords to all pages
- prepare meaningful copy for all key pages
- prepare titles and alt-tites for all links using meaningfull keywords and summary of copy
- prepare header titles <head><title> . . . </title></head> with meaningful titles and best set of keywords (for meaningful storage in Bookmarks)
2) Prepare (ideally) only usefull and valuable external links in pages
3) Design generated html-displays that implement #2) above
4) Design and create static html-files of key pages (for reading by the search engines):
- save the key html displays (generated by the php-code) in the /html directory
- ensure the html displays link correctly to each other
- ensure all internal links (those which drive the php-code) contain specified keywords and summary of copy
5) And finally: Page validation
- Page validation should be my first step, agreed: <A HREF="http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/direct.html" >WDG HTML Validator Direct Input</A>, but I have decided to put it last.

I'm partway thru testing this plan. Hope it works. Wish me luck, pls. :D !!!

Regards