SEO and Promotion of a Dynamic Database Driven Website (Help)

What you want is mod_rewrite.

Are you asking about using social bookmarking to promote your site or to use on the site itself?

For your site, one thing to check is your spelling. You might miss out on a lot of queries if you haven't got the words spelled correctly. Another really important thing is to make sure your tags match the title of your content. Search engines put a lot of importance on those.

You should also try to pull in some of your article content on the home page. This makes it easier for the search engine to find those pages becasue they are linked directly from the home page (rather than having to follow several links). That's easier for people too.

Excellent, thank you very much for your advice, i have looked into mod_rewite before, but like i said it seem only to be possible in ASP can i add this to my existing code? or have i got the idea totally wrong? I will keep researching further on this and see what i can come up with.

As for social bookmarking, yes to promote my site, and if it is seen as a useful feature then i would use it as well, i thought that the use and promotion came hand in hand?

Again, thanks a lot.

Relentless.

I believe mod rewrite is language independent. As long as you are running Apache (and I think you are) you should have no problem using mod_rewrite. ASP has nothing to do with mod_rewrite.

If you want your URLs to look like
http://www.soul-designs.co.uk/article_vault/search_engine_optimization...
you will have to modify your code in
http://www.soul-designs.co.uk/article_vault.php?id=12
so that the "id" is a string instead of a number. In your database you have an ArticleID (or something like that), but if you want keywords in your URL you need to make a unique column that can be used to lookup articles.

In article_vault.php you might have some code that looks like:
$sql = "SELECT * FROM Article WHERE ArticleID = $id";

but it will have to be changed to something like
$sql = "SELECT * FROM Article WHERE SEO_URL = '$id'";

As mod_rewrite is Apache module, I don't think you'll be able to use it for ASP sites.

There are some advantages to using URLs ending in id#s particularly if they are sequential.

One is you can use an app like autositemap to auto generate an xml sitemap using the id #s

For a general review of SEO for PHP sites, I wrote an article a couple years back, but I think it is still pretty valid PHP, SEO and Spiders -- Oh My

here is a Word version

or you can follow one of the links here

(the web hosting company that commissioned the article thought it was worth syndicating - however I found out after the fact that it was a "ghost" writing gig, so I took the $$ but not the credit)