Post # 100 - There and Back Again: a SEO's Tale

Following a little tradition I’m noticing here on SEOchat – I thought I'd write up a bit for my 100th post.

Ready? Here we go:

Just ten months ago - if you came across my only site, a small personal website for my wife and I - you would have noticed its construction via Adobe ImageReady and the all-too-familiar ‘slices.’ The page took about 3 minutes to load with a DSL connection (being all unnecessarily high-res pics made to “look” like it was HTML) and had links to html documents all created with Microsoft Word. This wasn’t necessarily a problem. It served a purpose.

But something happened to me that I think happens to all webmasters at some point:

$$.

It motivated learning.

What I’m going to share in this post is a series of tips, advice, and links I’ve found along my 10-month journey thus far that have helped me learn SEO as it relates to the web, web hosting, web servers, and some basic client- and server-side scripting to get things done with web browsers, databases, web-crawling, and email.

First of all, the huge sites that you see on the net with thousands of URLs that look like they were made individually by hand and uploaded ….were not. They are dynamic pages that are stored in a database and when a request like…

http://sub.main.com/folder/1/2.html

…comes along an Apache server module called “mod_rewrite” rewrites that URL on the fly to something like:

http://www.main.com/page.php?s=sub&f=folder&p1=1&p2=2

Where the file “page.php” can take the parameters “s” – “f” –“p1” - “p2” and make requests to a database to bring forth content to be spewed out to the browser in any desired format. This very website – forums.seochat.com – uses it. And for beginning sites with low rank it can help considerably getting robots to follow links and index pages. To learn more about mod_rewrite check out the links in Bruno’s sig or do a search – there are plenty of good tutorials out there.

Essential tools for a webmaster include having a good working understanding of scripting on the client- and server-side. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_scripting ). In a few hours with basic tutorials like the ones at w3schools.com you can learn the basics of Javascript for the client-side, and most importantly, PHP (my preference) for the server side and for interacting with a database like mySQL.

This brings us to the next important SEO tip – choosing a web host. This is a ridiculous market. If you’re using windows and want to run your own server for free you can go to http://www.wampserver.com/en/index.php and download Apache, PHP, and mySQL bundled into one. Open source is wonderful. Similar things can be found for any OS. But odds are you’ll find some cheap web host company that will give you ~5GB of storage space, ~300GB bandwidth per month, and have PHP and mySQL already installed on a server (that you’ll share with thousands of other customers) for less than $7 a month with a two-yr contract. You won’t get perfect uptime – but life is like that and it will serve the purpose (no pun intended). Make sure you choose your domain name carefully (targeted for keywords but catchy enough to make an impression) and register it for 10 yrs because this is an SEO factor.

Design your site smartly and carefully before you start ANY coding. Use CSS – no excuses. ( http://www.w3schools.com/css/ ) Don’t crowd your HTML. Keep client-side scripts in separate files and “include” them. Keep your main file less than 100KB – the smaller the better.

Next, to learn how to build a database-driven website using PHP and mySQL I would highly recommend sitepoint.com Kevin Yank’s article on this very topic at http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/ddws/2.html -- I probably referred to this article a million times as I was learning how to build and query databases for the web.

Also, you’ll spend a lot of time at www.php.net – where you can find quick information for any function simply by typing its name as the URL path: i.e. www.php.net/stristr or www.php.net/arsort or www.php.net/unpack

Once you get rolling with PHP, mySQL, and creating lots of nice URLs with rich, unique content. You’ll want to fine tune and search engine optimize (SEO) your pages even further than when you planned it out. You can use PHP to make yourself some simple SEO tools.

The simplest way to grab source content from another URL and put it into a string is

$contents = file_get_contents("http://www.domain.com");

Then you can, say, grab all the link texts (anchor texts) by


$anchor_text = "";

while ($current_source = stristr($contents, '<a ')) //get to anchor tag
{

$current_source = stristr($current_source '>'); //get to end of tag
$current_source = substr($current_source, 1); //jump up to the text
$current_anchor_tag = substr($current_source, 0, stripos($current_source,'</a>')); //grab all the anchor text
$anchor_text .= ' '. $current_anchor_tag; //add it to our achor text string or do whatever...
$contents = stristr(substr($current_source, strlen($tag)), '<a '); // chop as we go

}


Or perform similar functions on different parts of a page to get data and mess around with it. If you’ve been reading the forums here you’ll note that keyword density is good for noticing a possible Over-Optimization Penalty (OOP) – but all in all you want to consider Keyword Weights (http://www.miislita.com/term-vector/term-vector-1.html )

Then, my last tip is for staying aware. For hatching sites with few hits its fun to set up an email notification to send yourself an email with the IP and easy link to www.dnsstuff.com (to get geolocation, server, ptr, etc...) whenever someone comes to one of your pages. Make sure you check for a referring URL so you don't get an email whevever a robot visits your site (unless you want it)

The below code will tell you how to track the keywords people use with google, MSN, yahoo, etc.. to visit your site and store them into a mySQL databse and email you a notification of their visit.



And with that - you're on your way! I'll leave RSS and such for another day. But I have source code for all that if anyone is interested...

If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask!

~HN Will