Seo'ing Your Site Tips and Tricks to Search Engine Optimization

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Hey guys, just wanted to share some information with you, and also hopefully learn more from you, regarding Search Engine Optimization(SEO).For those of you who don't know, it is the process of making your site a much more search engine friendly one. Take Xisto for example. If you notice, the address of each page has information relevant to what the topic is about. This helps search engines "classify" the page based on content.Now, based on what I know, there are different things that search engines frown upon. Please correct me if I am wrong on anything.1)Search engines hate addresses in the format of...For example, "http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?pages=19f;Instead, they would much rather see it as "http://www.yourdomain.com/relevantinformation.html;2)Search engines do not care if your site is on a domain or subdomain? I thought this was wrong but others claim it's correct.For example, http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ would be just as good as http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ still want to dispute that, but my knowledge is very limited.3)Search engines love metatags. Now, here's where my issue comes in. How do you metatag things like forums? At the moment I am using SMF, but would gladly change to another forum if I knew how to make them more SEO'd. Preferably a free forum-base for now.4)Search engines love sitemaps.Now, there are many different addons to CMS's(Content Management Systems - Joomla, Drupal, php-nuke, are some examples) that will create dynamic sitemaps. But I was reading earlier that it is very important to have a link to the sitemap on your homepage as well. Is that really necessary? I personally uploaded the link to my sitemaps to google, yahoo, etc. So does it make a difference whether or not I have a link to it on my index page as well?5)PageRank is based on "linkbacks." Now here is another issue that I have had in the past. It's obvious that linkbacks do matter, but do the pages they are on have to be listed under Google as well? I have put in ~50 links to my site before(older website) and only 2-3 ever came up as "linkbacks" in Google Webmaster Tools. Is this normal or did I do something wrong?6)Search Engines love newly updated information. Dormant sites are not as good as thriving ones, in terms of how they are ranked.So here go my questions(aside from the few that I posed up above).1)How do you efficiently SEO and get forums crawled? That is something I've always had issues with. When it comes to websites I know how, but forums rarely ever get listed. I have noticed a lot of threads on Xisto appear on Google within 24 hours.2)If you have a website, SMF forums, and a social network, what is the most efficient way to sitemap them? Run 3 separate ones? Have a sitemap that just links to the main pages of all 3 and hope that the search engine crawls all 3 mediums by itself?3)How do you get more linkbacks to show up on Google?Thanks in advance guys. There is probably a lot more that I would like to know but right now my brain is locked out. Please post any questions you have as well. Hopefully we can all work together to better understand how SEO works and how to maximize the efficiency of it.

[Echo_of_thunder 1]

Very Good tute you have there on SEO, and yes Meta take and keyword are your main key for a SE.Always remember to use words that are dealing with your site and also some words at are in the description of your site.Like say you have a site about flowers. not only would you use that word but you can also do this.Flowers,roses,rose bud, remember though never use more than 2 words when doing a key word in your meta tags. I have found out that this is your best bet when you SEO your site.Also a clean discription of your site. normallt something short 25 to 30 words is best so I have been told. Some debate on that I am sure.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

In terms of the description, should it be the same for every page or does it need to be different?Right now my site is in Joomla, and it has a "global" setting for the description *and* keywords, but either or both can also be overridden in each article.So should I set it up to where the description is global and keywords are different from one article to another?That was another concern of mine. I'm not sure how the search engines actually *read* the sites. If they see 1000 pages with the same description, would they automatically assume that they're the same?With how many pages I(we) are planning on adding to the site on a daily basis, it would be a hassle to go through each one and keep adding new descriptions. The key words, fine, as those are short.And I noticed that you use commas...So they should all be on one line, like literally "Games, Computers"? Or would it also be okay to put them on separate lines?

[Nabb 0]

I think you can do something like <META name="keywords" content="games computers">With regards to URLs like index.php?id=483, there are options to change these to more search engine friendly URLs for the common CMS like Joomla and Drupal. In Joomla, you will need to turn on SEF mode (Search Engine Friendly), and you can write an URL alias for each post. In Drupal, you will need to turn on 'Clean URLs', and you can also write an URL alias for each post after turning on the 'Path' module.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Yeah, I already did that with mine. What I'm more or less attempting to do right now is try to piece together exactly what the Google search engine wants, how it interprets various things, etc.It will guide me on it's own(as I learn) as to how to maximize the efficiency of my SEO work.What do you guys think is the most keywords that should be used at once? I did a search but the closest answer I could find was "too many will seem spammy to the search engine" which isn't really what I'm looking for.Like 15 is too many, or would it be more like 40?An estimate would be fine, or...How many do you all use?

[networker 0]

It never occured to me before that search engines might appreciate sites that are updated even more.The thing is,if you have a news,event based site then such a thing is a given.My sites are more online software based,so updating text has never really been an issue. It's food for thought though.

[websey 0]

Hi Guys,I would think to be honest 25 words would not be classed as spammy but unless you work / control the google search engine you will never know Also it does not have to be news or text as such that is updated on your site but more the fact of last edited so say you upload a new index / pictures page every day that would be just as beneficial as updating a news page with fresh news every day....That is also why you will find that a lot of game server stats pages are ranked high in google...for instance if you google my gaming name morbid_websey it will come up on gametracker 1st as I am on there everyday and it is updated everyday...Anyway maybe I am going off the point here....But generaly I had haveing to SEO and most often dont have to as in my business I dont offer it and personal sites I dont have to as they are gaming sites and the only way people tend to go to them is through back links anyway alright hope that helpedwebsey

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I thought by updates it meant actually changing or adding data, being that without actual changes the search engines can tell that they are just the same thing as before. I don't think it has anything to do with the "edited" date/time.I could be wrong on that though.

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

Linkbacks can really help you out. I run a PR1 site that has very few linkbacks, but they are to good sites that also have a high PR. (simplemachines.org and a topsite. I have links on other high PR sites, the official site, but Google has yet to get those).SMF is pretty much SEOed to the max, but there is SEO4SMF (not on the mod site though), but I haven't used it enough. Google indexes my pages well, and I still have pretty high ranks on it. Mine gets crawled at least every hour, and I run SMF too. I think it is just a matter of how lucky you are.I don't sitemap (mine is broken, maybe SMF 2.0 RC1 will fix it?), but I know they help. I think 1 sitemap does the job, but I'm not completely sure.Forums are hard to get crawled and placed right. My top 2 on google are the main page and a suggestion board. Yahoo I believe has a thread as the first one. Maybe this is because there is no sitemap, but I know some other forums that have the same problem.Good Luck!

[asdftheking 1]

You propose an interesting SEO question when you mention using META keywords for a forum. I don't know if it's been done or if maybe there are tutorials out there, but theoretically it wouldn't be too hard to make dynamic metatags. My idea goes like this:Create or download a list of keywords, I suppose it could contain 500 or 5000, but with my knowledge of linguistics I would say 1000-2000 would probably suffice. Store it as a PHP database and write a code snippet which will search the post for the words in the list, and then without duplicating them use PHP to insert them into the header as your keywords. I know very little about PHP, I know all of this could be done in Javascript except for the database part. But if you can insert content into the page header using PHP, which I imagine you can, there should be no problem.Anyone tried this? Let me know if I'm wrong.

[Echo_of_thunder 1]

You propose an interesting SEO question when you mention using META keywords for a forum. I don't know if it's been done or if maybe there are tutorials out there, but theoretically it wouldn't be too hard to make dynamic metatags. My idea goes like this:Create or download a list of keywords, I suppose it could contain 500 or 5000, but with my knowledge of linguistics I would say 1000-2000 would probably suffice. Store it as a PHP database and write a code snippet which will search the post for the words in the list, and then without duplicating them use PHP to insert them into the header as your keywords. I know very little about PHP, I know all of this could be done in Javascript except for the database part. But if you can insert content into the page header using PHP, which I imagine you can, there should be no problem.
Anyone tried this? Let me know if I'm wrong.

Well the forum that I use allows you do add your meta tags in the SEO Settings AEF I have found it to be a good forum and much better tham SMF honestly.

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

As for your asking about domain vs subdomain, I think it is just a matter of choosing the best domain. My site had high ranks as a subdomain, then dropped when I first got a domain, but increased about 6 months after I got the domain. I have heard that age of the domain has to do with SEo, and I believe it. I rarely see brand new domains ranked high on Google.As for your index.php?page56 type thing, I really don't think that has anything to do with SEO and ranks in Search Engines. I have seen other people say it before, but I know of a bunch of sites that use that format, and are high on Google.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

As for your asking about domain vs subdomain, I think it is just a matter of choosing the best domain. My site had high ranks as a subdomain, then dropped when I first got a domain, but increased about 6 months after I got the domain. I have heard that age of the domain has to do with SEo, and I believe it. I rarely see brand new domains ranked high on Google.
As for your index.php?page56 type thing, I really don't think that has anything to do with SEO and ranks in Search Engines. I have seen other people say it before, but I know of a bunch of sites that use that format, and are high on Google.

With my domain http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I had #1-5 ranking for many key words even a week after the site was created. They were keywords as common as "Aion information" or "takeover." So about domain age mattering, I don't really see how.

And for the page links, I was reading it matters because of how the search engine recognizes it, and also makes it easier for others to visit pages directly(with a better url. Like yourdomain.com/information.html instead of yourdomain.com/query?=39&page=9 or something like that.)

It seems to be key words that determine your place in rankings the most. I've locked a few #1 key words for common things even with a page rank of 0. But higher page rank means you get crawled faster/more often I think. For example, I have pages I posted weeks ago that still aren't indexed, even though I have a decently high ranking on the search engine itself. Whereas other pages get crawled faster. On a blog the fastest I saw a page crawled was under a minute after the article was posted, but I'm not sure if that's just because it's when the crawler hit the page anyways or if it was due to page rank.

There is still so much to learn, .

[TheDisturbedOne 1]

To tell you the truth, I think some of it is just chance. I made a new site today, and planned on working on it this weekend, and releasing it next weekend. I googled the name of the forum of the heck of it ("[band Name] Fans" and it isn't an underground band or anything like that, semi-well known) and I saw that I was #9! I didn't even put in Meta tags or anything of the like, I just installed it and put on a new skin.So SEO does have a luck element involved.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

To tell you the truth, I think some of it is just chance. I made a new site today, and planned on working on it this weekend, and releasing it next weekend. I googled the name of the forum of the heck of it ("[band Name] Fans" and it isn't an underground band or anything like that, semi-well known) and I saw that I was #9! I didn't even put in Meta tags or anything of the like, I just installed it and put on a new skin.
So SEO does have a luck element involved.

That makes a lot of sense. I've locked some things in places 3-8 on my gaming website that have nothing to do with gaming...Like "ant" or "queen." All because someone on our forums posted about killing the ant queen in Lineage II... There's absolutely no meta data/tag attached to that either... So how I would lock something completely unrelated to my site I do not get, but I won't complain either, .

It would be nice if there was a real guide (from Google) explaining the system and how it works, but then people would abuse it for themselves.

Like with everything else, some people screw everyone else over by trying to get ahead.