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More About This Title Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP:A Developer's Guide to SEO
English
Cristian Darie is a software engineer with experience in a wide range of modern technologies, and the author of numerous books and tutorials on AJAX, ASP.NET, PHP, SQL, and related areas. Cristian currently lives in Bucharest, Romania, studying distributed application architectures for his PhD. He’s getting involved with various commercial and research projects, and when not planning to buy Google, he enjoys his bit of social life. If you want to say “Hi,” you can reach Cristian through his personal web site at http://www.cristiandarie.ro.
English
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction xvii
Chapter 1: You: Programmer and Search Engine Marketer 1
Who Are You? 2
What Do You Need to Learn? 3
SEO and the Site Architecture 4
SEO Cannot Be an Afterthought 5
Communicating Architectural Decisions 5
Architectural Minutiae Can Make or Break You 5
Preparing Your Playground 6
Installing XAMPP 7
Preparing the Working Folder 8
Preparing the Database 11
Summary 12
Chapter 2: A Primer in Basic SEO 13
Introduction to SEO 13
Link Equity 14
Google PageRank 15
A Word on Usability and Accessibility 16
Search Engine Ranking Factors 17
On-Page Factors 17
Visible On-Page Factors 18
Invisible On-Page Factors 20
Time-Based Factors 21
External Factors 22
Potential Search Engine Penalties 26
The Google “Sandbox Effect” 26
The Expired Domain Penalty 26
Duplicate Content Penalty 27
The Google Supplemental Index 27
Resources and Tools 28
Web Analytics 28
Market Research 29
Researching Keywords 32
Browser Plugins 33
Community Forums 33
Search Engine Blogs and Resources 34
Summary 35
Chapter 3: Provocative SE-Friendly URLs 37
Why Do URLs Matter? 38
Static URLs and Dynamic URLs 38
Static URLs 39
Dynamic URLs 39
URLs and CTR 40
URLs and Duplicate Content 41
URLs of the Real World 42
Example #1: Dynamic URLs 42
Example #2: Numeric Rewritten URLs 43
Example #3: Keyword-Rich Rewritten URLs 44
Maintaining URL Consistency 44
URL Rewriting 46
Installing mod_rewrite 48
Testing mod_rewrite 49
Introducing Regular Expressions 54
URL Rewriting and PHP 60
Rewriting Numeric URLs with Two Parameters 61
Rewriting Keyword-Rich URLs 64
Building a Link Factory 66
Pagination and URL Rewriting 72
Rewriting Images and Streaming Media 72
Problems Rewriting Doesn’t Solve 75
A Last Word of Caution 75
Summary 76
Chapter 4: Content Relocation and HTTP Status Codes 77
HTTP Status Codes 78
Redirection Using 301 and 302 79
301 81
302 82
Removing Deleted Pages Using 404 83
Avoiding Indexing Error Pages Using 500 84
Redirecting with PHP and mod_rewrite 84
Using Redirects to Change File Names 85
URL Correction 89
Dealing with Multiple Domain Names Properly 90
Using Redirects to Change Domain Names 90
URL Canonicalization: www.example.com versus example.com 91
URL Canonicalization: /index.php versus / 92
Other Types of Redirects 94
Summary 94
Chapter 5: Duplicate Content 95
Causes and Effects of Duplicate Content 96
Duplicate Content as a Result of Site Architecture 96
Duplicate Content as a Result of Content Theft 96
Excluding Duplicate Content 97
Using the Robots Meta Tag 97
robots.txt Pattern Exclusion 99
Solutions for Commonly Duplicated Pages 103
Print-Friendly Pages 103
Navigation Links and Breadcrumb Navigation 104
Similar Pages 106
Pages with Duplicate Meta Tag or Title Values 106
URL Canonicalization 106
URL-Based Session IDs 107
Other Navigational Link Parameters 107
Affiliate Pages 108
Redirecting Parameterized Affiliate URLs 109
Summary 118
Chapter 6: SE-Friendly HTML and JavaScript 119
Overall Architecture 120
Search Engine–Friendly JavaScript 120
JavaScript Links 121
DHTML Menus 121
Popup Windows 121
DHTML Popup Windows 129
Crawlable Images and Graphical Text 129
Search Engine–Friendly HTML 140
HTML Structural Elements 141
Copy Prominence and Tables 141
Frames 144
Using Forms 144
Using a Custom Markup Language to Generate SE-Friendly HTML 145
Flash and AJAX 149
The Blended Approach 149
Summary 150
Chapter 7: Web Feeds and Social Bookmarking 151
Web Feeds 151
RSS and Atom 152
Creating RSS Feeds 154
Syndicating RSS and Atom Feeds 160
Other Sources of Syndicated Content 164
Social Bookmarking 164
Summary 172
Chapter 8: Black Hat SEO 173
What’s with All the Hats? 174
Bending the Rules 175
Technical Analysis of Black-Hat Techniques 176
Attack Avoidance 177
HTML Insertion Attacks 177
Avoiding Comment Attacks Using Nofollow 180
Sanitizing User Input 184
Requesting Human Input 188
301 Redirect Attacks 194
Content Theft 196
On Buying Links 197
Digital Point Co-op, Link Vault 197
Summary 197
Chapter 9: Sitemaps 199
Traditional Sitemaps 199
Search Engine Sitemaps 200
Using Google Sitemaps 201
Using Yahoo! Sitemaps 203
Generating Sitemaps Programmatically 203
Informing Google about Updates 208
The Sitemaps.org Standard Protocol 209
Summary 210
Chapter 10: Link Bait 211
Hooking Links 211
Informational Hooks 212
News Story Hooks 212
Humor/Fun Hooks 212
Evil Hooks 212
Traditional Examples of Link Bait 213
Interactive Link Bait: Put on Your Programming Hardhat! 213
Case Study: Fortune Cookies 214
Summary 218
Chapter 11: Cloaking, Geo-Targeting, and IP Delivery 219
Cloaking, Geo-Targeting, and IP Delivery 219
More on Geo-Targeting 220
A Few Words on JavaScript Redirect Cloaking 221
The Ethical Debate on Cloaking 221
Cloaking Dangers 222
Using the Meta Noarchive Tag 222
Implementing Cloaking 223
Cloaking Case Studies 232
Rendering Images as Text 233
Redirecting Excluded Content 233
Feeding Subscription-Based Content Only to Spiders 233
Disabling URL-Based Session Handling for Spiders 234
Other Cloaking Implementations 234
Implementing Geo-Targeting 234
Summary 241
Chapter 12: Foreign Language SEO 243
Foreign Language Optimization Tips 243
Indicating Language and Region 244
Server Location and Domain Name 244
Include the Address of the Foreign Location if Possible 245
Dealing with Accented Letters (Diacritics) 245
Foreign Language Spamming 248
Summary 248
Chapter 13: Coping with Technical Issues 249
Unreliable Web Hosting or DNS 249
Changing Hosting Providers 250
Cross-Linking 251
SEO-Aware Split Testing 253
Detecting Broken Links 254
Summary 259
Chapter 14: Case Study: Building an E-Commerce Store 261
Establishing the Requirements 262
Implementing the Product Catalog 262
Summary 281
Chapter 15: Site Clinic: So You Have a Web Site? 283
1. Creating Sitemaps 284
2. Creating News Feeds 284
3. Fixing Duplication in Titles and Meta Tags 284
4. Getting Listed in Reputable Directories 284
5. Soliciting and Exchanging Relevant Links 285
6. Buying Links 285
7. Creating Link Bait 285
8. Adding Social Bookmarking Functionality 286
9. Starting a Blog and/or Forum 286
10. Dealing with a Pure Flash or AJAX Site 286
11. Preventing Black Hat Victimization 286
12. Examining Your URLs for Problems 287
13. Looking for Duplicate Content 287
14. Eliminating Session IDs 287
15. Tweaking On-page Factors 287
Summary 288
Chapter 16: WordPress: Creating an SE-Friendly Blog 289
Installing WordPress 290
Turning On Permalinks 293
Akismet: Preventing Comment Spam 294
Sociable: Social Bookmarking Icons 295
WP-Email: Email a Friend 296
Chicklet Creator Plugin 298
Sitemap Generator Plugin 299
Google Sitemaps Plugin 301
Digg Button Plugin 304
Pagerfix Plugin 305
Eliminating Duplicate Content 307
Pull-downs and Excluding Category Links 308
Excerpting Article Content 309
Making the Blog Your Home Page 309
Summary 310
Appendix A: Simple Regular Expressions 311
Matching Single Characters 312
Matching Sequences of Characters That Each Occur Once 317
Introducing Metacharacters 319
Matching Sequences of Different Characters 324
Matching Optional Characters 326
Matching Multiple Optional Characters 328
Other Cardinality Operators 332
The * Quantifier 332
The + Quantifier 334
The Curly-Brace Syntax 336
The {n} Syntax 336
The {n,m} Syntax 337
{0,m} 337
{n,m} 339
{n,} 340
Glossary 343
Index 351
