SEO in 9 steps - Checklist

0. Put your homepage into the important directorys

Suggest your site on dmoz.org. You can consider to put your url into Yahoo directory. Generally you should always leave your url where other dont think you are spamming. Never spam!

1. Start a blog

Start a blog and post interesting articles. Make shure that the blog has SEO friendly URLS. Use wordpress if possible. http://wordpres.org. Make shure that the blog is within your domain e.g. yourdomain.com/blog

2. Make all of your URL SEO friendly

Use htacces to make your URLs SEO friendly. Use mod_rewrite

3. Give every page unique title, description and keywords

Use at most 5 keywords. How to

4. Avoid duplicate content

Make shure that every url is unique. Make shure that every mod_rewrite url is existing. more

Don’t use more than one domain for the same content.

5. Digg, Digg, Stumble and Digg

Submit your articles of your blog to Digg and your homepage urls to StumbleUpon

6. Make Post into Forums where you can put your url into the signature

That generates a backlink. Some readers of the post might visit your site. Use colors whenever possible. Dont use too big or animated banners.

7. Consider to create a Second Life Location

Second Life can create contacts to people who are really interested in your content. You can meet people there that you would not reach in the normal life. You can create a network between your Second Life place and your homepage.

8. Create a social mediasphere

Contact other people, talk to them, create groups and digg/stumble their articles. Be always nice to the people. They will visit your site and rate your articles.

Imagine you have a Homepage that has a database of articles.

To make the URLs SEO-friendly you usually put something like this in your .htaccess:

RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z\-\_]+)_([0-9]+)\.html$ /show_article.htm?articleId=$2&tit=$1 [QSA,L]

An URL like http://yourdomain.com/my_first_article_1.html will then lead to the article with ID 1.

But what happens if someone enters

http://yourdomain.com/my_second_article_1.html?

Then he will also be leaded to article 1 but through an other URL. This happens because the article usually is selected by the ID only.

If somebody link you with that wrong urls search engines will cache both URLs that both will lead to the same article. Thats bad for both pagerank and analysing the data.

And http://yourdomain.com/my_second_article_333.html will produce a STATUS 200 which means for

Search Engines that this article is existing.

There are two solutions two avoid this:

1. Pass the whole URI to PHP

Instead of defining single Rewrites for articles, categories, etc. you can pass the whole URI to PHP.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Non-existing files(=RewriteUrls) are redirected to index.php this way.

The index.php can interprete the the value of $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] which contains the whole URI without the domain. Then you can validate the entered URL and compare it with the URI you want certain pages to have, and if they are not equal you can put out a 301 redirect.

2. Check in your show_article.php if the article exist and the URL is correct

Then you can put out redirects if the URLs don’t match or the article does not exists.

$articleData=$dbModule->getArticle($articleId);

if(!isset($articleData)){
header( ‘HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found’ );
header( ‘Status: 404 Not Found’ );
require ‘your404page.php’;
header( ‘Connection: close’ );
exit();
}

//RUN actions here

$articleSEOurl=’/’.$yourutils->makeSEOurl($articleData);
if($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']!=$articleSEOurl){
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(”Location: “.$articleSEOurl);
header(”Connection: close”);
exit();
}
Another cool side effect of the second solution is, that if you run actions (make_comment, new_article)

before you are making the 301 redirect, something like this:

http://yourdomain.com/show_article.php?id=4&action=make_comment

will cause a new comment and after that the user is again redirected to the SEO friendly URL.

I think this is a very elegant way to keep the browser’s address bar clean.