Search engines can provide you with a way of attracting a great deal of targetted traffic or ensuring your site is found by the audience seeking it. It's no longer good enough to build a site and expect everyone to find it if you have not followed a few simple rules of SEO. Google, Yahoo! and MSN search all follow similar rules that are designed to help the searcher only. Only when you have satisfied those rules will you float majestically to the first page or even number 1. There are NO shortcuts!!! Occasionally a loophole appears that allows spamming of a search engine but only for a few short days, the Google staff know their algorithms better than anyone and will quickly close any loopholes created in an update.
Here's a list of must haves:
1 - Unique content, the more the better
2 - Fresh content, Google likes new content
3 - Many relevant links back to your site
4 - Each page individually optimised for specific words or phrases
I cannot help you on the first 3; content is just about putting the effort in. Put the dog and the kids out, take your codliver oil, and don't stop typing until sunrise! 100 pages is really the lowest you can get away with but aim for 500-1,000.
Backlinks are vital and all 3 engines rank sites with more backlinks much higher. Basically a backlink is a 'vote' for your site by another webmaster which the search engine uses to qualify your page as popular by virtue of number of 'votes' for that page. Best way to get backlinks is to email webmasters and politely ask for a link. There are arguments that recipicol links do not provide any benefit but one way links do, the simple fact is that you really need both and one way links are difficult to get.
Ok, so onto the bones of my article, how to use Xoops to optimise pages on your site! Here is a list (not definitive but comprehensive) of how you need to seed your page with the keywords in order for the Google, Yahoo! or MSN bots to pick them up.
Place your words in:
- Meta Keywords
- Meta Description
- Title of the page but not first word
- In
to ensure 100% the phrase is picked up by the most basic BOT
- In plain text on the main body of the page
- H3 or larger heading
- Bold in the 2nd paragraph
- Italic in 2nd or later paragraph
- In the ALT Tag for an image
- In a link text to another site or internal page or both (not applicable in the example)
So, how do you get Xoops to do this, actually it's very simple. The words the page is to be optimised with are usually going to be in the title of the article, e.g. this article is called "Search Engine Optimisation SEO for Google Yahoo and MSN" Xoops conveniently stores this title in the Xoops title code: <{$xoops_pagetitle}>, now all we need to do is strategically place this around the template. It will ensure every page is different and optimised for the words in the title of the article.
Download and make a copy of your themes.html page. This will be in public_html/themes/Your-Theme-Name/theme.html
Do make a copy of the original before you start! Only a fool would ignore this advice. If you make a mistake with just one character you can turn your previously nice tidy code into something that could only otherwise come from the devil's bottom itself.
Ok, now to get those words into the code just do the following:
We are going to change several tags in the HTML and add a couple more:
So change (please note I have removed opening and closing "<" and ">" from the statements so this renders in HTML, you will need to fix the tags:
From:
meta name="keywords" content="<{$xoops_meta_keywords}>" /
To:
meta name="keywords" content="<{$xoops_pagetitle}>, <{$xoops_meta_keywords}>" /
From:
meta name="description" content="<{$xoops_meta_description}>" /
To:
meta name="description" content="<{$xoops_pagetitle}>, <{$xoops_meta_description}>" /
From:
body>
To:
body>
noscript> h1><{$xoops_pagetitle}> /h1> /noscript>
From:
img src="<{$xoops_imageurl}>images/logo.gif"
To:
img src="<{$xoops_imageurl}>images/logo.gif" alt="<{$xoops_pagetitle}>"
From:
{$xoops_footer}> |
To:
{$xoops_footer}> | a href="http://www.your-domain-here.com/" target="_self"> <{$xoops_pagetitle}> /a
Few extras:
Additionally you can add in regions outside content or menu areas <{$xoops_pagetitle}> wrapped in bold and italics tags.
Also worth doing is to create a link using the <{$xoops_pagetitle}> as the HREF title and refer it either to the home page, article index or back to the same page itself. The preferable is the article index because this is likely to have the keywords in a link to the article you are referring from which search engines like.
Reproduced from forum post by 'hoorah' (untested, but fesable)
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Here is another idea posted by Cubiq on the forms
Per page meta tags with no hacks
For good search engine ranking is vital to be able to change meta tags on a per page basis.
In Xoops it is possible to change meta-tags and page title with few lines of smarty code in "theme.html", without php coding.
All we need is to check the first 4 characters of the smarty variable $xoops_pagetitle.
$xoops_pagetitle holds the current page title that may change depending on the module you are using (eg: News module 1.0 puts just the module name in $xoops_pagetile, but News 1.2 fills the same variable with module name, news topic and title). But what all modules do is placing the module name as first thing.
All we need to do is to modify few lines inside the "head" tag in your theme.html.
Look for:
<meta name="keywords" content="<{$xoops_meta_keywords}>" />
<meta name="description" content="<{$xoops_meta_description}>" />
Replace with:
<{if $xoops_pagetitle|truncate:4:""=="NewB" }>
<meta name="description" content="This is the meta description will appear if you are in the NewBB module." />
<meta name="keywords" content="meta, keywords, for, newbb, forum" />
<{elseif $xoops_pagetitle|truncate:4:""=="News" }>
<meta name="description" content="Here we are in the news section." />
<meta name="keywords" content="we, love, news" />
<{else}>
<meta name="keywords" content="<{$xoops_meta_keywords}>" />
<meta name="description" content="<{$xoops_meta_description}>" />
<{/if}>
What we do is checking the first 4 characters of $xoops_pagetitle variable and serving different contents depending on the module the user is browsing. This is not a per-page solution, but at least each modules may have their own meta tags. Obviously you may also change the page title for each or some modules adding the "title" tag in each if/elseif clause.
Note: Actually, with the same trick you may serve completly different layouts for each module! But I don't know if this is good for your server performances.
Important!!! Depending on your xoops setup and language the module name may change! Eg: this site's forum is named "Support Forums", so the first 4 characters we need to check would be "Supp" (and it should be case sensitive).
Again untested by the submitter here.
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And another hack from exploz see HERE
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There is also a hack to re-write query strings to SE friendly address. See details on the ShortURLs hack here
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Any feedback on these hacks please?
Re: SEO
OH I wish I had the ability. However I am deep into SEO. If XOOPS could do a URL with titles and have every page for Title meta tags and Meta Descriptions it would put them far above any competitor on the market....it's all about marketing anyway.
why isn't it already?
thanks for the great info. I implemented the first one idea of insserting page_title info throughout the theme.
Question on the second option with the if/else statements, how would you right the code if you didn't want to truncate the search for the page_title (module)?
thanks!