SEO Blog - SEO for Php Link Directory and Webmasters

I know there are a lot of tools there for site optimization, but here are the list of the tools I use and I would highly recommend it if you haven’t tried before

1. Google Analytics
I can not stress how important this tool is and what makes it the best tool? You got it, it is a free tool. With this tool, you can monitoring how many unique visitors you have per day, per month. What keywords drives traffic to your site. Which site refer the most visitors to you and the most important thing is you can identify areas you need to improve the most for improving your conversion rate.
http://bizsolutions.google.com/services/

2. Google Webmasters Tool
This is where you would submit a .xml sitemap to Google. You can also find other information such as detected dead link. In this tool, Google also lists the words that is associated with your site so you can check if your site’s content is relevant to the keywords you are targeting.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

3. SEOMoz Page Strength
This tool analyze your sits and return a final score based on the number of your pages indexed by Yahoo and Google, the number of links you have from .edu and del.icio.us, the age of domain, your alexa rank…etc. Other similar servic: sitening.com
http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength

4. FeedBurner
if you publish a blog, FeedBurner’s service is a must have. Feedburner will provide you with statistics regarding your blog’s feed and you can give your readers the option to subscribe by email instead of RSS. There are a number of other features that you can read about at FeedBurner. Opps, I have yet had one, I should go and get one now.
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home

What comes to your mind when I tell you to optmize your site? You will definitely say something like titles, friendly urls, quantity and quanlity of backlinks… etc. But do not ignore the trivial things when it comes to SEO since it still can impact the site to some extent and sometimes to a large extent.

95% of webmasters (or even more) know robots.txt tell search engines to exclude certain areas of your website such as /images and /temp. However, almost less than 35% of websites had a robots file and a lot of sites simply copying a robotx.txt file from another site. Spidering is a costly effort that search engines try to optimize. Therefore, it makes sense that websites that demonstrates optimal command will get rewarded.

At SES NewYork Summit, all search engines announced that they will identify site map via robots.txt file. So now, you got one more use with robots.txt by adding a line like this:
sitemap: <your sitemap URL>. A lot of people have been asking whether they can submit a sitemap to MSN. Well, here is your chance to tell MSN that you have a sitemap and hopefully that will get your site quickly indexed.

We know Google has alwasy been trying to return the best search results. Thus, Google wants to eliminate any pages that does not add any value. Google Webmasters Gudielines clearly tells that it wants webmasters to use robots.txt to to prevent crawling pages that does not add any value to users. So what are you waiting for, it is what Google want, if we want good ranking results on Google, then at least comply with their guidelines.

For more instructions, you can visit robotstxt.org

When I was optimizing my directory. I though a news feed from other sites such as Yahoo or businessweek.com would be pretty cool. Generally, depends on which category the visitor clicks on, the corresponding news will show up. On one side, it may interests the visitors since that’s the topic they interested in. On the other side, it is good for SEO sine the content refreshes everyday (as long as there are some thing new happening everyday).

However, after following the steps, I still can not get the news item display correctly. I doubled checked my installation but still can not pinpoint the problem. I contacted the developer of the news feed script. He is so nice and we really had conversions back and forth. Finally, he mentioned that it could be the problem of my server. It is likely that fopen is restricted for security reasons.  So I asked the supporter from Godaddy. Well, it is true, they disabled the fopen() function.  This is not the end of story though, i know that the CURL can be used to replace fopen().  I wish the developer can look into that and come up with a solution.  If anything comes up, I will keep everyone updated.

I have seen some people asking why the random featured listings are not showing on the homepage after installing the featured listing mod. Thanks to Dawzz, who is a phpLD moderator in phpLD forum,  solved this problem.

The original code is:
Find
echo $tpl->fetch('main.tpl', $id);

in your index.php, and above it, place:
$random_link = $db->Execute("SELECT * FROM {$tables['link']['name']} WHERE FEATURED = 1 AND STATUS=2 ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5");
$tpl->assign('random_link', $random_link);

Then place this in your main.tpl file depending on where you want display it

if $category.ID eq 0 and not $p and not $qu}{l}Random Link{/l}:

{foreach from=$random_link item=link name=links}

{/foreach}{/if}

For some people, this is not working, the homepage shows nothing, to fix it, in your index file,
use GetAll instead of Execute:
$random_link = $db->GetAll(”SELECT * FROM {$tables[’link’][’name’]} WHERE FEATURED = 1 AND STATUS=2 ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5″);
$tpl->assign(’random_link’, $random_link);

then in your main.tpl
use
if !$uid & !$search & empty($category.ID) & !$list & $scriptname == "index"}
instead of
{if $category.ID eq 0 and not $p and not $qu}

At last, add this to your init.php before ?>
$tpl->assign('scriptname' , basename($_SERVER[PHP_SELF], ".php"));

SEO friendly url for regular pages such as latest links page:
This trick is from http://blog.rakcha.com/2007/05/03/phpld-seo-friendly-pages/ , thanks to the admin who provides the code for free.

If you are using the default template or some other templates, usually look into top-bar.tpl, however, as I was using this sunnyblue template, the top menu is found in the header.tpl


FIND: {$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/index.php?list=latest
REPLACE BY:{$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/latest-links.html
FIND: {$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/index.php?list=top
REPLACE BY: {$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/top-hits.html
FIND: {$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/index.php?list=latestarticles
REPLACE BY: {$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/latest-articles.html 


You only need to change the URL of latest article URL if you use phpLD 3.2.

Make sure you add the following code in your .htaccess after RewriteBase/ 

##Latest Links Rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule ^latest-links\.html?$ index.php?list=latest [QSA,NC,L]##Top Hits Rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule ^top-hits\.htm[l]?$ index.php?list=top [QSA,NC,L]


For phpLD Version 2x, use the following code in your .htaccess:

##Latest Links Rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule ^latest-links\.html?$ index.php?p=d [QSA,NC,L]##Top Hits Rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule ^top-hits\.htm[l]?$ index.php?p=h [QSA,NC,L]


You can look at my demo pages here:
Latest listings page,  Top Listings page 

This modification is simply, not only you want pages like that to be friendly, you also want the detailed listing page to be friendly as well so it gives more incentive for webmasters. Check here for SEO friendly details pages.

Although page URL is not as important as other factors such as backlinks and page title. It is a must for any web sites who want to get high rankings. Among the 3 search market leaders, Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN), Live still put a lot of weight to keyword-rich page URL. If you are targeting for a keyword such as “SEO tips”. Do you want the page looks like “yourdomain/index.php?=3″? We want the URL to be self-explanatory as well. So a URL like “yourdomain/SEO-tips” would be great if that’s the exact phrase you are using. Some some search engines still have difficulties indexing long URLs containing stuff like session IDs.

I am not here to brag about it, but you can take a look at my URL for example. For this wordpress blog, I installed plugins to make the SEO friendly URL. If you click on the title of this post, you will see the URL http://www.directoryseo.org/seo-blog/seo-friendly-url

I think this is the URL that can be self-explanatory and it contains the relevant terms/keywords. There is a chance that if someone search for “how to make seo friendly URL”, my page will show up. (at least the URL increase the chances).

It is sad that php link directory comes with “SEO unfriendly URLs”. Mods need to be applied to make your URL SEO friendly. If you already did that, ignore it and go play some computer games. If you haven’t done it yet, read “Make your URL SEO friendly in php link directory”

If you have read my previous post about meta tags, now you may want to have unique description and keywords for your pages (well, unless my previous is not well stated, which could happen though).

Adding meta tags to your categories in php link directory is easy. You do not need any additional mods to achieve that. I am using the phpld 3.1 version. So I am sure 3.2 have this feature as well.  To add meta description and keywords to your page, log into your admin panel first. On the left side, click categories. Then you will be able to see a list of categories on your site including the top level one and sub categories. Scroll to the right side, click on edit (a icon with pencil, very descriptive), Then you will see the meta tags section, simply put your description and keywords. Voila, now you are heading towards good SEO practices.

I also strongly suggest you to fill in the description for the category. If you do not have time, ask your girl/boy friend to do it. It will be a good chance to see whether he or she really likes you or not.

Meta tags, we probably all know what it is and how it is used by search engines. Let’s assume that we are all the beginners here first. Meta tags present some information about the website to search engines, it can show your website’s keywords, description, author, content type and more to search engines. Among these information, meta keywords and meta description are considered to be two of most important factors affecting your SERPs. To view a web page’s meta description and keywords, open a web page and view the source, you should be able to see something like:

<Meta name=”description” content=”Some meta description here”>
<Meta name=”keywords” content=”meta keywords here”>

In the old days, people almost rely on meta tags to get high rankings. However, people start to abuse it and then search engines soon find out all the tricks. It has been argued that nowadays, meta description and meta keywords has no impact on your ranking and thus we are seeing missing meta tags. It makes sense since it does not affect the rankings. However, in my opinion, we still 100% need meta description and keywords.

If you do a simple search on Google, you will see that all the sites will be showing with a title and description. Then the word or phrase that is in your search term will be highlighted. The description could be either from your meta description or from the content on your page. If you are missing meta description, then the relevant content on your page will be taken. The problem is that do you always have relevant content on your page? Some pages like contact us, support or any other pages that mainly shows images will not have enough content for search engines to determine what your page is about. What happens is that Google may see all of your pages are so similar that it will group your pages into “duplicated results”. Even say you got content on every single page, will you be 100% sure that your site is well structured and coded so that the content will appear as front as possible? Search engines may have difficulties if your do not follow good practice when designing your site.

Other than that, some search engines still make use of meta description and meta keywords when deciding the rank of your page because they are not as sophisticated as Google.

If you are using CMS or any other software building your site, make sure you are given the chance to write unique meta description and keywords for your page. Most often, plugins or extensions are needed. If you are using Php link directory 3.1, (or any other version, but I am not sure about older versions), you will be able to do that without any mods. If you are not familiar for adding meta tags in phpld, read it here : How to add unique meta tags in php link directory

DirectorySEO.org blog is successfully set up today. Before I put up this blog, I was thinking of what should I write for this blog? Should I write something that is cool about my directory simply for promotional purposes? Well, that was my first intention for this blog; however, surprisingly, I found that there are so many websites out there that are developed without any SEO in mind, not even the simplest factors, such as unique title and content.

Besides that, I have seen a lot of directories that using the php link directory did not optimize their site as well. If i am a business owner who runs business online, I definitely would not submit my site to a directory that is not SEO friendly.

Good luck to all the webmasters and directories owners, hopefully this blog will be useful to all of you.