8 White Hat SEO Methods forPHP Developers :8 White Hat SEO Methods forPHP Developers David Fischer Avity LLC


The Spectrum of SEO Techniques :The Spectrum of SEO Techniques White hat, black hat The three legs of the white hat SEO stool Inbound links Keyword-rich text Technical aspects 1 Know the Game


Cross-Browser Websites :Cross-Browser Websites 1 Know the Game


Cross-Browser Websites :Cross-Browser Websites 1 Know the Game


Cross-Browser Websites :Cross-Browser Websites 1 Know the Game


Cross-Browser Websites :Cross-Browser Websites 1 Know the Game


Slide 7:A common misconception: There are two steps in building a search engine friendly website: 1) Build website 2) Do SEO stuff 2 SEO-Friendly Architecture


Slide 8:From the start: Limit reliance on JavaScript, Flash, and images that display text Use SEO-friendly HTML Unique, meaningful title and meta tags W3C compliance Alt attributes on non-text content Structure your content wisely & develop a corresponding URL schema early on Register your domain for the maximum term 2 SEO-Friendly Architecture


Slide 9:Keyword-rich URLs help rankings Human factor Clean URLs look professional Messy URLs look spammy Please compare: “The mere presence of a question mark in the URL will introduce a delay in Google's indexing a page.” -- Daniel Dulitz, Google engineer 3 URLs Matter


Slide 10:Repetitive content annoys users dilutes page equity wastes crawler resources looks like spam can be an indication of content theft As a result, search engines penalize duplicate content 4 The Duplicate Content Trap


Slide 11:Sometimes you can't entirely avoid having duplicate content on your site... Printer-friendly pages Same product, different color Duplicate title & meta tags for different pages URL-based session IDs implemented by the guy who worked on the project before you Your boss's poor content organization skills Minimize indexing of duplicate content using robots.txt & mod_rewrite 4 The Duplicate Content Trap


Slide 12:1xx: Provisional response – don't use 2xx: Successful request – return by default on success 301: Permanent move – OK Page equity retained with delay and possible penalty 302: Temporary move – avoid 404: Permanent remove – OK Spiders will not index Warning: spiders will DEINDEX if previously indexed 500: Correct code for temporary technical difficulties If you want to commit SEO suicide, feed a spider non-5xx codes while your web or database server is down 5 Content Relocation & Error Codes


Slide 13:style.css .nytimes { font: old-english-txt; font-size: 48; } 6 Graphical Text: An Ancient Evil Site designs sometimes require more elaborate text formatting than CSS can provide, right? Shortest and best answer (for SEO & maintainability at least): No, stick with CSS only! Short and acceptable answer: Okay, we can put in a few images for text, but no more than, say, three! But if you absolutely need more typesetting options...


Slide 14:User sitemaps Google XML sitemaps & Yahoo urllists Dynamically generating sitemaps 7 Sitemaps


Slide 15:Why not use black hat SEO techniques? Why address them now then? Protect your site's security Understand the competition Learn to think like Google Insertion & comment attacks Content theft Cloaking Buying & trading links IMPORTANT: employ common sense 8 Black Hat & Defensive Measures


Slide 16:Questions?