Hacks: SEO Paths & .htaccess

Posted by: wishcraftOn 2008/6/1 17:10:00 24231 reads
Well as you may have noticed I have been doing some examples in the wiki for .htaccess this is for primarily SEO Clean Paths for xoops, the modules I have chosen for the example in sharing this code is code for CBB (1.5, 2.2, 3.x), News 1.4+ (May work on earlier), myalbum-P, SmartSection 2.2, CatAds & the userinfo.php page.

What I have been doing over the last few weeks is testing various SEO paths to see what brings ultimate traffic, remember in changing your websites URL you may get sandboxed for a few months as the search engine detects a sitewide change.

Search Engine Optimization is an important step in making friendly paths for both Search Engines and the End Users, you normal for example use a dash (-) not an underscore (_) to SEO as this is detected and more compatible with a search engine algoritms, it is also helpful for natural language query.

You may also find various other SEO improvements you can make to stop keyword stuffing (Example Titles to Keywords) and so on my wiki profile page (these are deep in the forums).

Some example of some friendly SEO paths I have generated are as so:

Content 1.x: http://www.extraterrestrialembassy.com/content/Introduction-to-ETE/1
News 1.4: http://www.extraterrestrialembassy.com/news/This-Website/SEO-Paths/14
MyAlbum-P 1.5: http://www.extraterrestrialembassy.com/gallery/Ancient-History/3,0,10,0,1,titleA
wflinks: http://www.extraterrestrialembassy.com/weblinks/Alien-Information/2,0,0,0,dateA
CBB 3.08: http://www.extraterrestrialembassy.com/forums/ETE-General-Topic/New-Toliet-for-the-Space-Station/8,46,65,0,0,0,0
userinfo.php http://www.extraterrestrialembassy.com/user/wishcraft/1

Remember these SEO paths will increase traffic and delievery into your search engines, you must use a 301 Permanently Moved Redirection as this will remove the old link from the search engine and replace it with the new one.

The general rule for an SEO path is to contain something to do with the title, area of the site and category, remember to include at least the item identification number if possible for legal reasons.

SEO is a big step in improving the cleanliness of your site, as well as your image, we will be doing this here at xoops.org in the not to distant future.