Value of links in SEO

[happety]

First, to reiterate what George wrote, having a unique title for each page is, dare I say, critical. Here's why - First, it helps the search engine identify the page and most importantly, this is title that displays in search results. It's important that both the search engine and the reader can find the page using a search. Having a unique title provides this. The meta description provides the little paragraph under the title in search engine results. If the meta description isn't there, the search engine will attempt to extrapolate the information for the results, sometimes well, sometimes poorly.

After your site is good and indexed, when someone searches for a term that would return your site, all they would see is "Czech Friends" as the title of each result. (most search engines parse stop characters like .::..)

When I perform a google search of "CzechFriends.org," I only get two returns from your site, the index page and what appears to be an old iteration of your site. It has a unique title, but takes me to a different place with no link back to the site as you have it now.

Maybe that's what is being mentioned above, but I didn't quite get all of that. It seems like you have two (or more) different sites sharing the same domain name. Like you're attempting to separate the primary content with more specialized content, in this case, Ancestry with no links back to the true site index page. I believe this is very confusing for both the search engines and to the reader. Like I mentioned above, I got the impression this was an old site that you haven't yet removed, yet the more I think about it, the more it appears it's there on purpose. Very confusing.

If I'm correct, I would either make these areas sub-domains or simply keep them as is, but keep the primary menu on the left side the same for all sites and simply make this one section of the whole.

Do you have prewritten engine for your site? A Content management system? Or did you create the backend code from scratch?

[happety]

Real quickly, I stand corrected on not having a link back to the main site from the Ancestry section - I did find one, but the issue remains, because the "Home" link takes one back to the Ancestry section, not to the domain index. And once I do go back to the Czech Friends index page, I couldn't find a quick way to go to the Ancestry section - It's probably there somewhere, but if one can't find it easily, they might simply look elsewhere.

[McDuff]

Happety,

That's what I am trying to repair now as first phase of our marketing strategy: understand how to market websites and repair the problems.

There is only one site czechfriends.org, concerning the Czech US settlers history. Your Google search does not come to the index page, which is bad.

There are now two genealogy sites running, with identical content:
www.czechfriends.org/czechgenealogy
www.ancestry.com (real location czechfriends.org/czechancestry

That is temporarily since this week. The .../czechgenealogy is still the old location but will disappear completely when I update all links. That site always was a subdirectory - closely associated site of the main czechfriends.org.

The czechancestry.com site is the IRM that should function as a stand-alone site, albeight with links and references to the czechfriends.org. That site already has a better title structure since half an hour or so.

Question remains, how do I get changing titles on our php site? As mentioned earlier, our "head" section with title is only on the index page, the other page files are without head stuff.

[happety]

Question remains, how do I get changing titles on our php site? As mentioned earlier, our "head" section with title is only on the index page, the other page files are without head stuff.

There is an answer to that question, but without knowing the site engine, it is difficult. Are you using a particular package that creates the pages, or did you write all of the php yourself?

There is a way, for example, if you have a header page, say header.php that would contain a title variable. Each content page would declare the value of the title variable which would pass to the header page and display in the output in a unique fashion based on the page. Of course, easier said than done depending on how the site and page are created, but that's just a broad example.

You mentioned the index page contains all of the header information - it's possible to change the title and meta tags from a static field to a variable, then create 3 fields in the database (where the content is kept) for title, metatag and metadesc. I would assume each page is its own entry into a database - In addition to the normal page content, you would populate those additional fields for each page then pass that information into the meta variables. This would give you a unique title, meta tag and meta description on a per page basis.

[happety]

The issues we've been discussing can get fixed with a little help from the community... Beyond that, here are some SEO thoughts relating to your site.

There are many people competing in the commercial website space. If you were to perhaps be selling ipod accessories, join the club. There are thousands of sites doing the exact same thing. Therefore, I believe it is wise for you (as an ipod accessory seller) to spend a lot of time making sure your site is optimized in each and every way. To get listed near the top of the search engines, an eye for SEO detail is critical.

With you, though, that's not the case. Search engines like real content. Search engines like unique content. I honestly couldn't tell you how many sites there are that are just (or almost) like yours. My initial guess it not that many.

If this is the case, here is my advice - others might argue with me, but here it is anyway. You don't need to spend a ton of time making sure your site is 100% SEO perfect. You need to correct a few issues (which have already been discussed) then focus on content. In addition, a couple of other things like having a robots.txt and a search engine friendly, updated sitemap.

Though I didn't spend a lot of time at your site, it appears there is plenty of good content there and useful content. Search engines love this stuff.

If your content is unique, the search engines will find it and over time, will display it proudly. Again, you just need to tweak a few things to make sure the reader can quickly understand the results that the search engines return.

[georgeek]

Originally Posted by McDuff

Without destroying that or ending up writing endless complicated scripts, how can I change the title or meta tags on the different pages?

Just use <?php $title = "Page title here"; ?> in your header.php something like this <title><?php if(isset($title)) { echo $title } else { echo "default"; } ?></title>

Originally Posted by happety

If the meta description isn't there, the search engine will attempt to extrapolate the information for the results, sometimes well, sometimes poorly.

Even when the meta description is there if the description does not contain the words in the search term then it will either choose the snippet from the page text or dmoz (unless of course you have <meta name=�robots� content=�noodp�> in the page header).

- George

[Tom E.]

I try to use file names that work as page titles, like 'Contact_Us.php'. Then the code below gets included in the header of all my pages:

<title><?= $title? $title: preg_replace("/_/", ' ', basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], ".php")) ?></title>

If $title is empty, it uses the file name (with underscores replaced with spaces) as the default title.

[McDuff]

I think it’s time for some further clarification of our site’s dynamics (or not) and available tools. This will be a long post .

We have Macromedia studio 8 (thanks to a project) and notepad++ to do all our design and coding work, no special CMS, just write it and put it on the server for testing. The basics of our site are set up to use all possibilities of dynamic sites and MySQL, but in reality at this moment, we use hardly any of that, not even a database or “includes”. Database will come in the future though.

Our index.php is like a container with the header, sidebar navigation (including bot-trap), and footer already on the page and visible. Index.php has the doctype and head stuff and uses php to fill the body-content part of the container. We do not have additional header.html or footer.html pages as includes (if I use the right term here); they are pictures (header.jpg, body-bottom.jpg) called up in the index page with help of the CSS file. The entire code (with some blahblah deleted) is at the end of this post. I think that’s a rather clean and quick way of doing things, only one index.php and one CSS file.

As to this problem. I tried George’s solution with the one part in the head section of index.php and the actual page title at the beginning of a body content page. No dice, don't know why. Several similar solutions are posted in different forums, especially clean looks

<head>
<title><?php echo $_GET['title'];?></title>
</head>

with as links several variations of:

<body>
<a Href="?act=x” &title=”pagetitle"
</body>

I also tried putting the $title somehow in the ?php section in the index.php, in line with the require command. That would be the nicest solution, a simple "require" for each page, including an individual page title and description.

I tried several variations of these solutions, all no dice, that is, the tab of firefox and page source keeps giving “undefined index” and other errors.

Finally, Happety, you are right and I am spending waaayyy to much -unfortunately unpaid- time on getting this site perfect but ignoring parts of other sites with too many “under construction” pages. Then again, once I get going, I want to understand the basics, not just copy and past a piece of coding.



Layout of the index.php, full code you can see in "view page source"

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="cz">

<head>
<meta 'Content-Type' & 'Content-language' & <meta name="Author"
<meta name="description" content="Czech Friends, about the shared American Czech settlers heritage, historic emigration from South Bohemia to America, genealogy, and heritage or genealogy tours to the Czech Republic" />
<meta name="keywords" content=" ………" />
<title>Czech Friends, about the shared Czech American settlers' heritage</title>
<link href="css/fors.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>

<body>

<div id="main">
<div id="header" title="Czech Friends"></div>

<div id="sidebar">
*******
All the sidebar text and links comes here, for example
<li><a href="?act=14">Donations and subscription</a></li>
********
</div> --end of sidebar.

<div id="body_content"> this is the dynamic part getting the body content files

<?php
if(isset($_GET['act'])){

switch ($_GET['act']) {

*******
Here are all the names and locations of the body content files, for example
case "14": require("./donations.php"); break;
default: require("./intro.php");
}
}
else {
require("./intro.php");

*******
?>

<div id="body_bottom">
******
Text of body bottom for all pages
******
All closing codes </div>, </body>,</html>

[Tom E.]

I think you'll be better off if you have different files for each page that include the common stuff, instead of one file that includes different content based on a parameter.

Something like this:

PHP Code:

<html>
<head>
<title>unique title of page</title>
<meta ... other stuff unique to this page />

<?php
// include stuff common to all files that belongs in the header
require ("./common_header_stuff.php"); 
?>

</head>
<body>

<?php
// include banner graphics, menus, etc. that go at the top of the body
require ("./common_body_top.php"); 
?>

<div>
unique page content goes here
</div>

<?php
// include footer graphics, copyright, etc. that go at the bottom of the body
require ("./common_body_bottom.php"); 
?>
</body>
</html>

Now you are free to set the title and meta keywords/description for each page.

-- Tom

[McDuff]

Originally Posted by Tom E.

I think you'll be better off if you have different files for each page that include the common stuff, instead of one file that includes different content based on a parameter.-- Tom

That's exactly the opposite of how I do it now. I know that method exists as well (at least I do know now) but I would like to find out if it can be made to work using the set-up I have now and which I am happy with. In addition, it probably will be quicker than redoing a few hundred pages in six websites with several language versions.