Value of links in SEO

[McDuff]

I an now completing our non-profit website, so now is the time to make a sitemap and consider other things to promote the site and get some traffic.

Read a lot about page-ranking and SEO. Always thought that PR indicated how good you did in a search. Whatever, learned something new. Another mistake I often make is that I try to make things too perfect before coming out with it (and as counter sometimes throw an unfinished product out on the street too quick because perfecting something else took too long)

For a niche website (Czech US heritage and genealogy), how important are links coming to our website from other places for search results? More clearer, should I wait to get some or just make the sitemap and get google and other search engines to crawl our site?

[hobbes]

Go live. Your ranking will change over time. And get links to your site from other quality sites; that will likely help in the rankings, and if nothing else, it will drive traffic to your site.

[McDuff]

Originally Posted by hobbes

Go live.

Probably the best.

How is it with keywords in php sites?

Now, I only have keywords on the index page (which always is there with the sidebar and bottom text). The body-content text pages are without much coding makeup and mostly also without links to other pages or websites. They need keywords as well?

[georgeek]

Originally Posted by McDuff

Probably the best.

How is it with keywords in php sites?

Now, I only have keywords on the index page (which always is there with the sidebar and bottom text). The body-content text pages are without much coding makeup and mostly also without links to other pages or websites. They need keywords as well?

It is difficult to give practical SEO advice without seeing the site. When you say keywords are you talking about the keywords meta tag? Are you using frames?

- George

[McDuff]

Originally Posted by georgeek

It is difficult to give practical SEO advice without seeing the site. When you say keywords are you talking about the keywords meta tag? Are you using frames? George

In short: czechfriends org yes no


Our first site was pure FrontPage done myself. Simple, but it worked. Then somebody "upgraded" it to a site with frames and tables; did not look too bad but there were problems and I did not know what to do with it.

Our newer sites now all are php with CSS. The main site and its three subdirectories -for sub-sites with different layouts- all have their own index.php and css file. The index files all have the doctype declaration and the head stuff like css file location and meta tags (content-type, content-language, author, description, keywords).

Looking at the page source, you can see that the index file is permanently there. What I call the "body content pages" are called into the index page or however you name that process. That means that on some of the pages the keywords fit, but on other they do not. Adding all the keywords for each page in the index meta tag would make a long keyword section, and several keywords would not appear on the default intro page. Hence the question, should I add an additional keyword meta tag on a page to fit that specific page or that's wasting my time?

I realize that, since we do not sell products or have get income from adds running on our site, high traffic is not that critical for survival here. However, I would like to learn and understand all the tricks here, so we can use if for another site we are developing about ecomuseums, where we might need that more.

[georgeek]

I took a quick look at the site, a few simple things to start with:

Every page should have different <title>You title for this specific page</title> and <meta name="description" content="A description of this specific page" />

The title element should be not more than 66 characters long including spaces, in Title Case (Proper Case) and clearly written to indicate what is available on the page. Using more stopwords than necessary or characters like '|', ':' and '*' take up valuable space and should be avoided.

The description meta should around 150 characters long including spaces and should accurately describe each specific page except the home page or major section pages where site level descriptions should be used.

Accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthroughs if and when they are used as snippets on the results pages but they do not affect ranking within the search results.

The keywords meta is not used by the search engines in any significant way and none of them will index words contained in the keywords meta tag. So you can safely leave it out.

There is no point in having section index pages, what you really need are search engine friendly (SEF) urls:

http://www.czechfriends.org/emigration_museum/index.php is not SEF

http://www.czechfriends.org/emigration-museum.php is SEF

Note the hyphen, search engines have a problem recognizing the individual words in concatenated words or with underscore separators.

That is for now, more later if you have specific questions.

- George

[McDuff]

Originally Posted by georgeek

Every page should have different <title>You title for this specific page</title> and <meta name="description" content="A description of this specific page" />George

I have to read this carefully to understand everything, but I start to get the feeling that "target group friendly" and SEF end up being two largely opposite things.

Some first remarks and questions:
Reading some other fora, the issue of titles on each page seems typical for html sites without frames. We have a php site, where in effect the <head>...</head> section is the same for each page (as it is with HTML frames pages?). Without destroying that or ending up writing endless complicated scripts, how can I change the title or meta tags on the different pages?

Emigration_museum I changed to emigration-museum.

The emigration-museum/index.php refers actually to a different site with its own CSS, sidebar, header, etc. Makes more sense to me to have that running completely under a subdirectory, even if its less SEF. Can you get the same results with all files together in the same directory? That file should act as an second index file in that directory and immediately also get its associated CSS file and "default- intro" page.

Czechancestry is a IRM already and is also running under a subdirectory.

[Jeff]

Would http://www.czechfriends.org/emigration-museum/ be equally good as http://www.czechfriends.org/emigration-museum.php ?

For a while now (since switching from html to shtml to php) I've favored not locking myself into an extension in case I want to change the underlying server-side technology later, possibly to something that doesn't exist yet.) Is there a SEO implication of one over the other?

That's also very interesting about the underscore. I always thought that search engines would understand the _ as a space/break between words just like -. Thanks very much for the info.

[Andilinks]

Originally Posted by McDuff

...I start to get the feeling that "target group friendly" and SEF end up being two largely opposite things.

Unfortunately true all too often.

Originally Posted by Jeff

I always thought that search engines would understand...

A dangerous assumption, search engines are still very primitive and worse yet have no understanding or regard for fairness. Sometimes I feel the same about those who own/operate them.

[McDuff]

Originally Posted by Jeff

I always thought that search engines would understand the _ as a space/break between words just like -.

Same here. Two or three words written together can be difficult to read. Don't know from where, I had the feeling that, since two separate words is a nogo, the underscore made them look separate and SE would understand it as two words (good if they happen to be also keywords). For me, a hyphen just breaks up one word; like sub-domain or subdomain are grammatically one word; thought google would see it as such also.

Actually, we just bought czechancestry.com and czech-ancestry.com; both pointing to ../...org/czechancestry/, an IRM. For $9 per year, might has well have both. .
Paranoia as I am, checked the spelling five times if we really got it. I could not imagine that our older competitors had not taken it (having very long URLS difficult to remember) or, with so many domain names taken for tasting or unrelated adds, this one was not scoped up (like czechroots.com or czechancestors.com )

For the directory structure we have on FQ, does it matter bugger all if we use xx-yy or xxyy?