Would someone kindly help this newbie?

Greetings all,

I'm a rank amature in the world of website ownership and site design. In my "day Job" I do a little ABAP programming so I was able to figure out basic PHP and build my first site @ http://www.egourmetstore.com. I have a couple of basic newbie question I need to ask before submitting this site to the many search engines on the web.

A) Much of my site content is generated dynamically by PHP. What do the search engines see? The same HTML page users see or do they just see the raw PHP code that is actually in the file?

B) I have a link I call "Recipe Categories" which goes to a page and reads a database and creates about 60 or 70 new links all with the word "recipe" in them. If search engines actually see the links (vs. seeing a PHP while loop), is that too many key words for one page?

C) Here goes the standard newbie question - how do I rise in the SE rankings?

If this is too long winded - well I am a newbie after all. Please only flame lightly.


thanks all,
Mike

 

a) depends if you are generating session-id's or not

b) depends - if you are generating the links just to spam the engines then yes, it's too many. If the links are there for a reason, then no, it's fine.

c) read the forums for a while till you figure out what's what.

 

Never underate Meta-Tags, Titel and Alt-Tags! Just to name a few easy ones...that are good for newbies.

Greetz: jabz.biz

 

Here is one thing you can do right away to help your SEO. Your titles all begin with egourmetstore and then on to the keywords. Drop the egourmetstore from the titles.

Think of your Title as a major hook for search engine traffic. People are not likely to be searching for egourmetstore, though they might be searching by the thousand for a combination of your other keyphrases.

Have you done any research via Wordtracker or Overture to see which combination of your keywords are the most popular/most competitive? Start with that.

 

This tool may help. It will show you what the SE's see when they crawl your pages:
http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

There are also some other tools there that you may might find useful.

Good luck.

-jay

 

If it were so "cut and dry", there wouldn't be so many of us regularly on this forum day after day. There are a number of considerations including: title tags, focused keyword phrases (including number of searches per day versus number of links needed to be on first page), content (never understimate this one!), other on-page tags (e.g. heading tags, emphasis tags like bold, italics, strong, etc.), internal links and more.

It sounds like you really need to read and search through this forum. There is a ton of useful info here from people who know from experience. Then reread and research some more. Just when you think you have it figured out, something new comes into the picture you had not even thought about (not new from Google, Yahoo!, etc. but, new to you).

You are in great company. Take advantage of the work they have done!

 

Try this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=24046 for a few tips

 

Search engines will NOT see PHP codes, they will see the same HTML that your visitors see through browsers. When SE request for a PHP page, it will be parsed by PHP engine before being sent back to the caller.

 

I was about to ask a similar question.

If php was used to create the meta tags, would it be a problem? will the SE's see the meta tag or will it see just the request for the meta tag?

I've tried different se-simulators and they have different answers. so what is really the answer?

 

Thanks everyone for the great tips!!

Mike

 

puzzlebox, the SE will see the meta tag, not the PHP code. Here's more details of what happens for a simple case:
1. Browser/SE calls a PHP page
2. Server receives the page request, looks for the page
3. Server runs the page through PHP parsing engine
4. PHP engine spits the output in HTML/text form back to the server
5. Server send the output to the caller (browser/SE)
6. Browser/SE receives the HTML

So there's no way SE can see the PHP code unless there's something wrong with the PHP engine (e.g down).

 

hi here is a site I made with php it is totally dynamic yet on the first page of google (and yahoo MSN) for nearly every every related key word phrase. all the meta tags titles descriptions and content come from a database.

then I mod re-wrote all the urls. to look like normal html.

have a look

www.villacontact.com

 

Nice summary of how dynamic script works.

 

wow, thanks.

 

Don't forget a sitemap. They are easy, fast and helps with SE indexing. Here is a link to the google group about sitemaps:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/google-sitemaps?lnk=lr

Good Luck
BIGBOB