SEO Blog - SEO for Php Link Directory and Webmasters

Since I had a blog, I have been trying hard to find ways to display my latest posts on my homepage. Firstly, it displays fresh content and thus SE should like it. Second, I want people to be able to see the latest posts without clicking to my blog page. I have been research on how to integrate wordpress but so far i had no luck with it. Today, when I playing around with feedburner, which in my opinion, is a must have tool if you have a blog on your site. If you have not had one, go here and sign up: http://www.feedburner.com

A live demo on my home page: SEO Directory HomePage

After creating your account, login into your members area and click on publicize tab, then select BuzzBoost:

Then all you need to do is to activate this service. Once the service is activated, you will get a piece of code. Before you copy and paste to your main.tpl file, you should set up some parameters first according to your own preferences.

I would also suggest you input some CSS style in your own stylesheet and overwrite the style provided by feedburner to match your site’s design. Here is a complete list of the class you can control:

Feed title: .feedTitle
Your post headline: .headline
Excerpt: div
The date: .date

You can also oeverwrite the displaying options by editing the <script> tag,
script src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/seo-blog-directory?format=sigpro<addthings here to control>

For example, if you decide to high the title:
script src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/seo-blog-directory?format=sigpro&displayTitle=false”

if you want the excerpt to display 30 words
script src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/seo-blog-directory?format=sigpro&excerptLength=30″

You can get a complete instruction on feedburner on apply your own the styles.

There are a lot of mods available online telling you how to add a thumbnail to your details page. One of the most popular ones is to add a Alexa thumbnail to your detail page. Well, there is another way to do this. Usually when a listing becomes featured listing, a thumbnail shows automatically. Thus, if we look the featured listing tpl file - f.link.tpl (different templates could have different file names for featured listing), we can see a piece of code like this:
<img src=”http://msnsearch.srv.girafa.com/srv/i?s=MSNSEARCH&r={$link.URL|escape}

That’s right, it is the code that display a thumbnail for your featured listing. Now you can copy and paste this code to your detail listing template file - detail.tpl. you may try it a couple of times to make sure it displays at the right position on your detail page.

A live demo here : detail page with thumbnail

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.

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.