Hey all,
I have quite a few questions regarding dynamic site creation (database driven) and SEO. This is my first attempt at a "real" "serious" web site and i want to get as much right first time as possible.
I have done a lot of research but wanted to get some advice from some professionals and more advanced web designers and developers (You guys and gals 
).
Ok first of all i am sorry if i have put this in the wrong place, if so just move it 
My website i am current designing http://www.soul-designs.co.uk (wont be the actual URL just there to develop it) is a CMS coded by myself in PHP and mySQL, it is a dynamic site that aims to allow users to share articles, code, links and other programing, network security and web realted topics. There will eventually be a forum and many other features, but that's not why i am here.
What i want to learn about is SEO, i know the basics of this and i do know how different it is with dynamic sites, the way the article and code system works is like many other sites like mine, by grabbing the requested content from the database in a URL such as http://www.soul-designs.co.uk/article_vault.php?id=12. (NOT A REAL LINK) Now to my understanding search engines cannot map this link, or if they can not very well.
What i want to learn is how other sites like mine end up with a URL of something like http://www.soul-designs.co.uk/article_vault/search_engine_optimization_t... (NOT A REAL LINK) even though they still grab the data from a database when requested.
I understand this might have something to do with URL Re-Writing/Masking is this true? if so how come all i can find on URL masking is related to ASP servers and is it possible to use this on my website that uses PHP and mysql?
I am also interested in learning how social bookmarking is done, why and how effective it would be on a site like mine.
Any other advice on how to optimize my site so that search engines can pick it up, a long with any other promotion ideas would be fantastic, darn any help at all would be highly appreciated.
Thanks all, i hope i was clear on what i would like to know.
Thanks again.
Relentless.
Knowledge is Power.
Megan posted this at 13:36 — 10th June 2008.
She has: 10,288 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
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.
Megan
My web design blog
IO.Relentless posted this at 15:05 — 10th June 2008.
They have: 19 posts
Joined: Jun 2008
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.
Knowledge is Power.
Megan posted this at 13:05 — 11th June 2008.
She has: 10,288 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
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?
We've had good success with StumbleUpon in particular. Part of the craft here is being able to create great content that these audiences would appreciate. I use Stumble Upon myself so I get a feel for what those users like. We also had an article hit the front page of Reddit on saturday and got lots of traffic from that.
The other angle I was thinking about was to include some social bookmarking features on your site. Set up a digg clone or whatever. Lots of other sites do that though so you'd have to provide something different.
Megan
My web design blog
teammatt3 posted this at 16:00 — 10th June 2008.
He has: 1,902 posts
Joined: Sep 2003
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'";
My Site | Regular Expression Tester
demopaul posted this at 14:46 — 24th June 2008.
They have: 114 posts
Joined: Sep 2006
As mod_rewrite is Apache module, I don't think you'll be able to use it for ASP sites.
decibel.places posted this at 18:41 — 24th June 2008.
They have: 672 posts
Joined: Jun 2008
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)