How to keep search engine friendly sites using PHP

I have starting using PHP on my sites and the more I learn about it the more exciting I am but I have also fucussed myself on SEO issues in the last couple of years and now I am worry about keeping up with the search engines.
I realy want to use PHP but how to keep the sites search engine friendly, any suggestions, opinions or proven strategies?

Thanks,
Jan

All of my sites are PHP, and they index just fine on both Google and Inktomi.

About the only things you need to watch are:

1. Keep URL's to having no more than 2 parameters (i.e. file.php?p1=p&p2=2)
2. Avoid session id's, or anything that looks like them (eg. sid=23kjl23jhjh234j23323j). If your site uses session id's, set it up so that googlebot and slurp (inktomi's spider) can navigate through without getting a session id.

They are really the only two points you need to keep an eye on though... even if your site does use more parameters, you can always get around them using mod_rewrite (which flattens the url's removing all parameters) - that's something you only need to look at if you have lots of parameters though, I wouldn't bother with it if all your files have a maximum of 2 parameters.

Thanks,

Are you using often php includes on your sites as well? Do you know how search engines or their robots handling the contents of those includes? Is there any good way to force them to reead those included content?

I know, many questions but it seems to me that you know much more about it as I do.:-)

If you can - for the URLs, do a mod-rewrite, it helps a bit.

Also, I am sure you know this but Ill say it anyway. Look at the source code of your page, that is what Google sees. So that answers your include question.

What is exactly meand by mod-rewrite? How does that looks alike?

Well, with an apache server you can use a mod_rewrite to rewrite the URLs to look more like static URLs.

For example, a url that looks like domain.com/browse.php?category=4&brand=7&color=19

The url might look like: domain.com/pants/jeans/levi/blue/levi-blue-jeans.html

This way you get keyword rich text in your url as well and its search engine friendly (non of the ?,&,%,=).

That is very interesting, I assume that this is not php because I could not find it in the manual at php.net.

I would have no clew how to use this option on my site since I am hosting my web by some provider and have of course no access to the server self.

Do I need such direct access to the apache server if using this mod_rewrite option?

Jan

Ask your provider if mod_rewrite is turned on. I am not a programmer so I am not sure technically how it works. I just tell my staff to make it happen and they magically do it.

Let me know if you need more help.

Thanks.

Learn how to rewrite URLs, there is no way around it. I guess 1/10 of my SEO business is URL rewriting.

Thanks guys... this is good info.