I have a website designed using dynamic web pages/php. I was wondering if there are issues with search engine indexing with this type of website? I think the traffic should be higher for my site. I am not sure if it is a matter of key word optimization, structural/meta-tag issues or the URL for the 1300 pages of the site are too long. One of the URLs looks like this: Home Page: http://www.onestopwriteshop.com/index.php Thank you for any advice, Litwriter21 BTW the design of the site is simply beautiful and I couldn't ask for any better support or work from a company out there. I suppose I am just concerned about the optimization.
I have to agree, it is a very beautiful looking site. the following may help, along with relevant back links from other sites. it would help to have unique title/keyword tag for each page (they were the same on each page that i looked at) no point in having the search engines listed at the bottom of your index page. rel no-follow on your "Printer Friendly Writing Display" and maybe a few other links. block search engines from "Printer Friendly Writing Display" via a robots.txt file. You do not have a robots.txt file and trying to find one takes you to the main site index (not wise from a search engine point of view and may confuse some search bots ? ) vagrant
Nope. Search engines don't care which server-side language you use because they're still going to generate HTML. How and where are you promoting the site? You can't rely on just the search engines to bring in traffic. That's just one part of a balanced marketing strategy. The first thing I'd do with the URLs is use a 301 redirect to choose either the www. or non-www. version (since .www is a subdomain). You've already chosen to use directory indexes (I'm not fond of doing this since it can cause a maintenance headache later on), so you're good there. At this point, aside from optimizing the page content, I'd focus on marketing and promoting your site. If any structural changes were to be made, I'd focus on using headings for the page content to identify and introduce the sections of page content that will be coming after them.
Thank you vagrant and Dan Schulz, for the information, I really appreciate it. I am very new to all of this. What I worry about the most is being misled by search engine companies since I am not an expert in the field. It feels like taking a car into the mechanic and now knowing where the oil stick is! (Which I know btw, LOL). When you said content in the above post were you referring to the text on the home page or in the code? I took off the search engine links from the home page. What other types of links could I use other than links to other websites for writers? We are building a resource for writers area for sites that deal only in creative writing, online writing, etc.. to link back to the site. Are these the types of links you mean? (I may be referring to the first reply). I have been up all night working, so my brain is slightly off duty. Thank you for the information. I'll create a link to your site from my blog page. If you have other advice, I'm all ears! --Litwriter21 <a href="http://www.onestopwriteshop.com" target="_blank">Online Writing Community - Critique, Read, Write, Learn, Publish, Blog, Chat, and Earn Cash. </a>
Well, some semantic markup would probably help your search ratings, and frankly, cutting the code down so you can FIND the page content in the source likely wouldn't hurt in any of the three important arena's - Filesize, clarity and maintennance. The only header tags anywhere in your source are h3's or lower, you're wasting tables on single columns that should likely just be lists, a horde of inlined presentation and a lot of the 'confusing bloated nonsense' that's a telltale of using a WYSIWYG. A good indication of 'bad code' is the relationship of filesize to content size. Open up the page in a browser, hit CTRL-A, copy the text to a text editor - that's 2,960 bytes on your main page - to which you have an ungodly 36,191 bytes of HTML... I would be SHOCKED to see that page properly coded break the 10k mark (6-7k is 'realistic' for that amount of copy). I mean, some of the wasted code and bloat has an obvious source - Microsoft products and their buggy HTML output. Seriously, all of the lines that start: <div class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><span style="font-size: medium; font-family: verdana,geneva;"> or the sections that do this nonsensical rubbish: <p><span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana,geneva;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><strong></strong></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p> SERIOUSLY need the axe. You've got a great layout, but some SERIOUS issues under the hood.
also try to use modrewrite to rewrite your url eg. www.helloexample.com/index.php?chapter=1 ----> www.helloexample.com/chapter/1
I'll just input that I don't get the header image. It's lame and looks like something Aunt Bertha would use on her Genealogy page. Other than that, I actually spent a half hour reading a couple stories. See what a little marketing does? LOL.