I’ve touched on microsites before, but lets go a bit more into the concept. The idea is essentially this, build seperate, small websites that are good for several reasons:

• Being Separate from your mainsite has its advantages. You can be more specific, where you couldnt build a 5 page detailed look at one product easily on your oscommerce you can on a seperate site. Also by being seperate you can highly target your seo more blatently without worrying about jeperdising your main branding. Similarly you can express other thoughts on a topic, for keyword placement and to attract different end users only to lead them to your main site.
• A setup microsite can act as a bridge drawing people to your main site.
• A setup microsite can feed PR to your main site (hosted with a seperate company)
• Quick to set up
• Done correctly it can provide free advertising, free customers to your site, free PR boost for your site and even create a revenue.

Effectively you decide on your main site, 2 sites or small network of sites - your flagship big push project/s and then build a network of smaller, supportive ‘pusher’ microsites to aid the growth of your main site. They are designed to be left alone with little to none maintenance post development (which should only be a day or so) and self sufficient, paying their own way.

Here’s a few steps I would advise you read before proceeding with developing a good microsite network as a base to a main site.

Steps:

1. Get a different host - Hosting accounts are key to making use of microsites. It is probably not nescessary to have a different host for each site - maybe 2 microsites per hosting account in different niches. This is because each different hosting account will have different IP (shared hosting might have a load on one ip.) Different IP’s will help defuse your spread to the search engines. (it will help but I am sure google is not stupid to this!)
2. Get a good keyword relative domain - “candle-wax.com” would fit a candle wax subsite.
3. Go Niche - Choose an absolute niche - go niche and then niche of that niche. The better the niche the more chance your microsite has - if you sell a range of candles, make a microsite about candle wax types.
4. Build around a main site - using the previous example if you ran an online candle shop you could build microsites on: candle wax, bees wax, candle products, candle gallery, homemade candles, original candles, world candle records.
5. Time Manage microsite production - Limit your time on each project - I tend to allow a day every few weeks to building a microsite. Its not always constrained to a day, and doesnt always take a day - but don’t waste years making it stunning, stick to the basics - good original content, good link structure and clean code.
6. 1-15 pages - its only a microsite, start it as a microsite, plan how many pages you are going to have and fill them with good original content.
7. Links - Stealth links work - make it a ‘fake’ online shop that when the person clicks ‘add to cart’ it sends them to your main site, its also a great chance to get some real contextual links to your main site. Use words that are what the pages they are linking too.
8. Monetize - I will explain further down but done well will actually make money as well as helping your main site.

So if you manage the above you should be able to create 1 microsite in a day, 1 effective, targetted, long tail niche micro site in around 8 hours. Then what? Well then you push it - as you would any other site - but provided you have chosen your niche well and seo’d your pages this shouldnt be too hard. Strategic linking of your microsites together can help although you want google to think them as different as possible so use different sources for linkage, dont typically link them all together and try and differentiate them all from each other. Also do not use your main site to help them - this is not benificial. Use the microsites to boost your main site not the other way round!!

Monetizing your microsites should more than cover the costs associated with setting them up, therefor allowing you a free place to advertise, draw customers and further dominate your niche.

First things first stick some pay per click or similar on there - although typically you are trying to get people to your main site - so not over the top otherwise you might loose customers for only a few pennies. Using Matched.co.uk you should be able to make a minimum of £15 per month, unless your site is badly designed and poorly linked too (and you don’t have 5 good pages on it). You give them 5 urls that you will stick links on and they will approve/not approve you and give you a bit of code. Having this ad on your site will then get you £3 a month. Not much but 5 of them and you get £180 a year - that should more than cover hosting and registration fees . You are limited to 5 sites with each account on matched though (each with 5 pages = £75 a month)

Kindly use this link if you are going to use Matched so we can all benefit

Further monetization with amazon affiliates, Commision junction or ebay auctions is all good progress but as the site is so niche you are not likely to get huge returns on the effort. Personally I keep it reasonably simple but I have got a few micro sites running all of the aforementioned.

So try it out - microsites as a base for a larger web project! - If you require further consultation regarding seo powered by creative microsites then let me know

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Next in our series of strategic planning your next web venture is Functions and includes. I am speaking php, although it applies outwardly to other languages. I won’t go into this too much on the technical front but with intent to plan they are key things to note.

Let your functions carry the site - Every bit of code typed twice is wasted time, poor efficiency and essentially extra cost, to keep this to a minimal every time you have a routine operation that you think you might want to use somewhere else - stick it in a function. Those few extra clicks on your keyboard might save you 5 or 10 minutes later looking for the code snippet you need.

“Functions spitting out arrays will save you days” - if you can get all the fields from a row of data into a nice array spat out of a good efficient function it can be a very useful way of coding more efficiently!

Includes - A good place to learn organisational file structures is well established open source solutions. Get oscommerce, download phpbb, go to wordpress.org and click download, open them up - install them, read the files, check how they do it. Typically all the aspects of the file are split into individual files. So the header may be header.php, footer - footer.php - hell take a guess at ’side_bar.php’. But they are like that for good reason, splitting the site up into as many parts as possible will allow you to be versitile with your site construction - stick a menu there, and on that other page but not on the homepage. Or use a header and footer throughout the site with just two lines of code: Include (”inc_files/header.php”); Include (”inc_files/footer.php”);

By using includes that are mercilessly divided into specific uses you can be harshly efficient with your pages, including only the exact required elements, no generic bit you forgot to cut out or header processing etc.

I usually tend to run a lot of the whole website from 1 main include file also, so I will have my header.php and footer.php but I will also run maindetails.php or similar - this will allow you to set default page operations throughout the site, such as automatically generating titles, headers, feeding meta data, page monitoring, user authentication, database details etc. Although top heavy it allows you to keep the main aspects together.

As a final note when building from the ground up, or any site that has substancial amount of custom functions. Lists and changelogs are a great tool for several reasons. Getting into the programmers mindset of keeping change logs, updating field lists or function lists will save you even more time as you progress. Secondly it allows greater dispersion of responsibility - as discussed in previous planning posts, its a dull point but what would happen if you died? or less dramatically if you wanted to employ a coder to take over? without any form of lists, annotation or change log it would be a nightmare and cost stupendously more than a little bit of while you work annotation. Even if you dictate your annotation and get it typed up! So do the boring - keep lists, annotate.

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If you liked this post then check out the rest of the series on programming your next e-business:

• Microsites - Use them to boost them
• Internal Search Engines - Getting people to the pages
• Pagex - download my free bolt on cms and seo tools

Here’s another in the series of things to consider when planning a new web venture. Searching is big news - so don’t miss out. When building a site - anything with more than 5 pages you will pretty much always benefit from adding an internal search engine, basic or complex, open source or hand written.

There are several options for including a search engine in your site, we will start with Open source options, move to google and end up building our own - each has its benifits.

Open source - Sphider.

I chose sphider because I am fairly familiar with it, and for its few annoyances its good. Its essentially a php spider that can be deployed on a site to provide almost a google emulated experience. The spider works well and you can leave it too it without issue. It uses a mysql database, which I always like, so as I can mess with it should I need too.

The best point to sphider that it is easy as pie - easy to integrate, easy to install, easy to understand. However with this ease comes the requirement to re-crawl the whole site when you add a few pages. Fine if you rarely update or run only a few pages, but for a bigger site this becomes tedious very quickly.

So IMO use sphider when your site is fairly stable, not particularly dynamic and if you want a quick BAMMM solution.

Googleness

So you can use the google search engine - which is good also - I won’t talk about this too much because I only use it on one of my basic advertising sites because it annoys me slightly.

Essentially you can use it but it will either require a ’site or web’ radio button - or if you are using adsense then provide you with 1 page of ads that will probably snatch your user before he even looks at the results. If he does look then it can be a pain letting him see what you want him to see.

Essentially even easier to intergrate google internal search is also good for a quick result - more dynamic than sphider but you lack absolute control over the search and its formatting.

Finally the home grown method

Build it yourself - Now its usually a toss up for me between using open source software which is free and either living with the annoying little facets or modifying them slightly OR completely writing a new version. The latter is usually less chosen because in efficiency terms its negative.

By building it yourself you can of course provide a completely bespoke solution but it may take substantial time or money to produce.

Having built several, I would recommend the following:

• Include “hot words” - words that when entered take the visitor directly to a call to action page, that is a common page where they can fulfil one of your aims, e.g. typing ‘contact’ takes the user directly to your mail form, ‘order’ strait to your order form etc.
• Look to match each and every part of the phrase - if its a string - explode it by ‘ ‘ so as you get an array to pass through your net. searching for ‘red box’ will then search for box’s of other colours and other red things for example.
• Build a weighted system - Make it possible to force specific pages up and down the list for keywords - Imagine you had control of ebay for a day - you would stick your most important, sales or contact - call to action pages at the top - so when you build your own include this control.
• Use Get rather than Post - By using get you can then later on provide tag like support for people e.g. if you like red boxes try looking at ‘red’ (then you can easily just link red too ’search.php?query=red’ - or whatever!)
• Log Your searchs - like all data, search data is useful. Whether its so you can improve the site, pick better keywords, weight pages or provide some sort of relayed content such as ‘most searched’ or whatever - save it down.

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Just a quick glimpse into the internal search engine, Based on the fact I have been working on ours today (wnu.) If you liked this basics to web planning then check out some of the others in my series on web development: Planning:

•  Pagex - Bolt on CMS for SEO people
• 10 Steps to submitting your site
• Phpbb, wordpress and oscommerce
• Mod-Rewrite - File Structures

I have just released the first version (after testing) of my new page tools. Named Pagex, these 2 php include files will provide a quick and easy bolt on solution for page related tasks. It allows you to do the following all from 1 single administration file. Best of all its free under GNU and is absolutely easy to install!

• Control SEO - Control all meta tags, titles and monitor page rank for all your pages from one place!
• Monitor pages - load times, page rank, turn them on and off for maintenace
• Basic in built CMS - Pagex has the in built ability to feed simple repetitive data across many pages (menus, headers etc.)
• Referrers, Referrer Logging - Don’t bother with log files - watch your referrers in real time, with PR rank, search query highlighting + more.
• Free under GNU license
• Runs on Mysql/PHP

Click here to download Pagex / Click here to view more details on Pagex

The following is an excerpt from my Pagex Page: 

Pagex - is a simple, bolt on tool that you can use to monitor your pages, feed them data, turn pages off for maintenance, analyse your referrers, page load times and customise all meta data for each page from one simple menu. All this built into 2 php files and made mind bogglingly easy for everyone from the SEO expert to the beginner web developer!

Next up with planning a website I am looking at a few out of the box platforms I use, phpbb, wordpress and oscommerce.

Forums - Basically you cannot go wrong with phpbb, its forums, ready to go, you probably don’t even need the ‘forums for dummies’ book. Basic Mysql and php knowledge will see it installed and configured within an hour, and there is a huge array of crazy modifications people have done, turning your forum from generic to specialist.

Phpbb covers the code, largely - even if only to use as a test base. I would recommend including a phpbb forum in 60% of start up website’s. Because depending on the site you will either get a good hit from the forums, with slow but steady inclusion of appropriate users or just spam. Car clubs, niche products that require substancial support - great examples of phpbb start ups, generic, huge or anonymous websites are probably better without it. Phpbb allows borderline sites to test out the idea of a forum easily, if it isnt working within a month - cut it out. One thing to mention with Phpbb is that things like verification images can help cut down on spam, but it does provide another avenue for spammers - Use as many measures as possible to stop repeating spammers- note thier ip’s and use htaccess to block them!! - Great things to add are themes (millions around) and custom emoticons.

Bloggage - simply put its down to preference, I can personally say Wordpress all the way. I just like it. With the new edition of 2.2 (I think) with tagging support it is hard to beat. I am obviously a bit biased as I am typing this strait into it. Things to note are modifications are made even easier with plugin support, theme editor etc. Again there are so many modifications for wordpress you can use it as almost anything, code is simple and well thought out - so making it do almost anything you want isn’t too complex. Enough Said!!

Selling - I will start with the platform, which depends on a few things. Credit Card processing should be taken into account before you buy a cart or even choose it. You may think its easy to get set up with a credit card processing account, but it can be a long drawn out process, it can take 5 days for them to ye’or’no you - and a fair few might turn you down unless you have impeccable credit and an established banking history (your business.) This is only usually a problem when starting up a new business. A lot of the time its your own bank who will most easily provide you with this service.

Depending on the bank/service there are an insane variety of shopping cart platforms. If you are using a mainstream UK bank, and intend to do all the shopping cart bit yourself, or you are keeping it simple and only selling a few products or services I would recommend Roman Cart. Its infinitely simple, and thats it downfall - its hosted by them, so you loose some functionality and essentially can only provide a ‘look a like’ shopping cart and processing section. Expect to pay £50 a year for this simple cart service.

If you intend to operate a webshop or to sell 5 to 1000 products I would recommend Oscommerce. For a start its free - which is always nice, secondly its supported by a good community, and as with all other good opensource platforms it has thousands of ‘contributions’ or modifications that help it be what you need it to be. I recently installed a HSBC module created by a member of the community to intergrate HSBC cpi with oscommerce - it was a bit problematic but the community provided great support and in the end its fully working at zero cost bar a few hours work.

I would go to the extent that oscommerce would be a good base even if you want to almost completly modify it. A lot of webshops that are completly unrecognizable as oscommerce sites, are - just heavily modified in appearance.

Open source is definatly the way to go in my opinion though - for start up business’s you cant knock free, well supported opportunity.

The idea behind Content Management systems is a sound one. You take all of the skill out of adding and maintaining content. You take the html, database and coding work out of the equation. Essentially you give the writing people the tools to write.

It’s a toss up of efficiency. In my experience 80% of the time its more efficient to plan and install a content management solution, whether its a page that is updated 4 times an hour or 4 times a month - if you can let someone else take care of it because you placed good coding behind it then its saved you time.

There is obviously two facets to this - the web design company and in house design - often if you hire in web design or development people that are not part of the company it wont be as efficient as possible. In all cases you are going to spend more than 3 months developing or £8k+ then employ a self motivating web developer for a half year.

The idea is to take all the coding and spend a little more to get it done right at the beginning - universal good quality coding that lays a basis for good site expansion.

Ideally every single aspect of your site will controllable by at least 2 people in your company. Leave it too one web developer and he will be swamped when he needs to be free, and should he ever get ill or leave problems will arise. So spend the time getting either your web team/web guy to make a good content management system and then TRAIN at least one other too use it, including a username/password system depending on the circumstance.

You can opt for out of the box content management - there are good examples available. Joomla is a popular one - or Wordpress could be used for simple sites. But likelihood is you will need to modify these to better intergrate with whatever it is you are doing, and if only one person understands the modifications the aforementioned problems apply.

So let your coder code and teach your maintainer’s to maintain. Further pushing the boat out, why not let your seo people do SEO? - Oh its complicated - because chances are they will want the control of a coder.

This is basically the reason I began writing ‘Pagex’ - Pagex is a seriously bare bones seo content management system. I have written so many CMS’s from the ground up that I know what I want for any basic site. With universal simplicity intended Pagex consists of 2 files. One php include and one php cms management file. My intentions for it are simple: Let people gain real control of their websites, really easy.

Pagex will work around you, not fouling up your code or taking huge loads on the server. It is a quite hardworking simple content management system.

I will write more about pagex over the next few weeks, it is essentially finished and just needs me to annotate code a bit clearer as well as creating a readme.

Aimed to be a content management system for SEO’s and webmasters alike. Because they are essentially a merging breed.

Centralised control of the following aspects - from one file:

• Page Titles
• Page Meta Description
• Page Meta Keywords
• Site Wide Headers
• Site Wide Footers
• Default titles if not set, Title Prefixs etc.
• Universal Directory’s - will adjust for creating endless imaginary directory’s with mod re-write
• Referrers
• Page Rank of Referrers and Internal Pages
• Load Time monitoring
• Single click disalble any page to the public - with custom maintainace messages, titles and html
• Dynamic Sitemaps
• Input Cleaning - Automatically remove SQL injection etc
• CSS file management, automatic linking
• Basic Visitor statistics - counters etc.
  
• Easy installation site wide of Google Analytics, Hit Tail etc.
• Automatic Keyword Generatio
• 4 CMS Slots - Stick any code anywhere using custom Code ’slots’

I will further delve into my new ‘Bolt on Content/SEO Management’ solution PAGEX within the next few weeks. It will help web developers and SEO operatives alike.

PAGEX - The SEO / Web Development Bolt On CMS. 

Mod Re-Write on Apache is a great feature, great for SEO work and great to keep things tidy.

When planning a new website you should think about how search engines will crawl your site and just as importantly how people will.

Never overlook content for some google context.

11 Points to make Mod Re-Write work for your users and google

1. Use directories to guide people - if the book ‘7 Habits of Highly effective people’ is one of your products make this obvious. “ www.bookshop.com/products/self-help-and-personal-growth/books/7-habits/ ” - maybe a bit long winded depending on the size of your operation - but is still better than ” www.bookshop.com/products/books/129/ “.
2. Use it to trick RSS readers - One problem that people don’t realise (not enough testing) is that yes RSS feeds are great and your users will love them, but readers can point blank reject any that do not end in .xml . Keep them happy - add the .xml to the end even if your showing a php file that generates the feed ” www.bookshop.com/rss/new-products.xml “
3. Be careful for loops - Theoritically its possible to create a 1 page php script/.htaccess file that could create an almost infinite loop that google would follow for months before realising it - this problem can occur with bad linking and the use of regular expressions in your .htaccess. If your .htaccess is programmed to send anything after your domain to a php file, nothing will ever be shown as not available - great you might think - but not if bots or people get stuck in the loop!
4. Learn it completly - Mod re-write is hugely under-used in my opinion - there are some great parts of it that can save you a lot of time with file creation and the way everything is processed. Learn it completely and utilise your knowledge to support a good php/asp/html/jadajada site
5. Use real pages too - don’t make your site too perfect - use some real file extensions too e.g. ” www.bookshop.com/about-us.php “. Hiding all pages behind Mod re-writes could waste time that you could spend doing other more important web work - with the one off pages (about us, contact us etc.) don’t bother. ” www.bookshop.com/about-us/ ” looks neater but has no real gain other than its neatness.
6. Combine it with a permalink script for maximum effect - With the right scripting your whole site can automatically create its urls on the fly, once set up you can have flashy keyword packed urls implemented by the adding of information. e.g. adding a new product ‘8th Habit book’ can be done, the url generated from the title so the link to the product is automatically set as ” www.bookshop.com/books/awesome/8th-habit-book/ ” - looks flash - helps pump googlage with keywords. (Note bookmark my homepage if you want a script that incorporates this and a lot more into an SEO CMS like system as I am currently sticking all these little bits I have developed over the years together!)
7. Pay attention to CSS and links - Adding directories that are not there is great in theory - but kills a page if it uses CSS sheets stored elsewhere. CSS gets its position from the url and PHP from the root: for example a file in your domains root directory called ‘example.php‘ could be called to show “ www.bookshop.com/examples/one/ ” but if this page outputted html that linked to a css file in the same directory it would load without a style sheet - because it would be looking for a style sheet in the directory ” examples/one/ ” - note links also wont work because of this principle. I have developed an easy get round for this that allows you to go as many directories deep as you want while maintaining all your links and CSS in the original directory. I will be releasing this within the next fortnight or so as part of a collection of SEO tools. (Bookmark www.criTix.co.uk - it’ll be worth it I promise!)
8. Stroppy Mod re-write - I have occasionally managed to piss mod re-write off, primarily it will just return 500 internal errors if you use short phrases or things like ‘directory’ in mod re-write. Just test the thing - good thing is if it doesn’t work - no pages will probably work - so it’ll be obvious!
9. Don’t overcomplicate your Mod re-write - Even though alot of the above points may indicate complicated or long winded .htaccess files - its best to keep it as efficient as possible (as with most things.) Huge htaccess files can be a burden and difficult to maintain - try to plan and maintain a good mixture of htaccess and inscript dynamics in the most code efficient way - no one likes a slow loader!
10. Actively use Modrewrite - The uses are endless - I have used it to show ‘maintainance’ pages while I work on parts of the site (you can temporarily divert all traffic to a folder to a certain file while you fix errors or such!), redirect badly spelt guesses at urls and consistently use it to hide the types of files I am using. Just remember modrewrite whenever you are planning site development - it will save you time!
11. HTACCESS is your friend - Like all good config files the best bit is you could have 10 files that do different things - that can be switched in an instance. Try one version of your htaccess out for a few months, keep a ‘maintenance’ version on the server and then just switch it when you are performing maintenance ( a quick hint: if you have 2+ .htaccess files on the server name them: .htaccess (the active one), a.htaccess, aa.htaccess etc.) this way they will always appear next to the active htaccess so you can simply rename the files to switch them around! )

This is part of a series of posts I am writing to develop further a concept of site development. I will detail all parts of website development, progression with times - seo age etc. I will also be releasing a bolt on SEO toolkit which will have a load of php,mysql,htaccess etc examples and a little SEO Content Management system that I use on every website I maintain!

Statistics are great, and no format of business is as easy to get detailed relevant statistics as web business. Statistics can help you finesse your site, improve your Return on investment (ROI), plan the site’s future, impress bank managers, friends and investors.

Overuse of statistics however can become addictive - you can find yourself checking ” how many hits today ” every half an hour and waste time that could have been spent bringing more people in. So as a cautionary don’t check them too often!!!

The main online statistic tools I use (to view internal statistics - not external keyword statistics or similar) are Google Analytics and Hit Tail.

 

Google Analytics - Visually pretty, fairly useful and free - Register through google and then to install simply stick a bit of Javascript on every page (urchin) and let it do its magic. Using a central file for footers allows easy insertion of said code.

• Geopositioning doesnt work particularly well in rural situations in my opinion, seeming to plant the position of the nearest big city rather than more local towns. But is interesting.
• Is useful in combinations with adwords campaigns as it intergrates keywords and campaigns with the statistics to allow you to better finesse your googlemarketing.
• Graphs are pretty and 50% are useful, learn and perfect the conversion goals to fully utilise GA.
• Reports are a nice function, you can set them to run weekly, daily or however often - unfortunately they will only email telling you its been collated with a link - not email reports directly (keeping you coming back.)
• Site overlay is also great if you have enough visitors - it will overlay a bar to show you how often each link on your homepage has been clicked (imposed over your actual homepage.)

But does all this really come for free? Well not really - I am sure there is more to it than offering nice free service for google. I haven’t had a chance to read the terms and conditions fully but I assume they use the data to further thier control of the internet - I personally accept this cost at the price of good easy statistics (the fact they have effectively javascript control over millions of websites is pretty mental.)

Hit-Tail - This functions in a similar way to google, you register and install a little bit of javascript calling code in the very bottom of your pages, but it offers a more simple approach to literally output where people came from. Its a great tool that in real time will provide you with the search phrases people use to get too you.

I would highly recommend hit tail to anyone who does any seo on their site - as well as allowing you to dynamically watch people find your site it also provides suggestions on keywords to target - which as far as I can work out are calculated by spotting the search’s that have brought people to your site but have very little competition on google.

Once you have got a few hundred + people hitting your site a day it will automatically spot the easiest targets for keyword focussing. Typo’s are quite a common as well as random things people type in like phone numbers!I would advise you set this up, once a week checking your suggestions list and picking the best keywords, focus a little seo on them and this will push you up for Used Search Phrases - likely upping your ROI.

Personally I also use a few scripts I have written that log refferer’s into a database that allows me to mess aroun with the data myself later - but these are slightly double bubble if you intend to use the above!

SEO is such a broad thing these days, to compete against the big boys you need to use every tool at your disposal. I start here because although a simple point it can give you that extra edge, and it also goes hand in hand with the planning and file structure.

With regards to SEO and SEM in general I will touch much more deeply on that later on in this series.

SEO within Filestructures - Firstly it should be noted that I am not at this point discussing the Directory names, but this does apply to them. Including keywords in the name of the directory is useful and should be done in a similar vein filenames.

Filenames - how important? you would think this is minimal - that the big SE’s wouldnt bother checking the name of a file. But they do. You should use every possible excuse to add a keyword to your site - this is one that consistently gets overlooked.

Yes it does make more sense to number files e.g. img1, img2 or so on, but with a bit of ’studio engineering’ file names can be great keyword carriers.

Google would largely rank ‘chicken-soup.com’ higher than ‘berts-recipes.com’ even if bert has a mouth shatteringly good chicken soup recipe (I don’t know either of these sites btw I made them up!) and this does continue down the line. ‘berts-recipes.com/chicken-soup/’ is alot more likely to produce results of more calibre than ‘berts-recipes.com/recipe2.html’.

This works in two ways (Literal file names & Mod rewrite):

Literal file names - that is when creating files with extensions that will be seen by the Gbots e.g. .jpg, .gifs, .php (not mod rewritten we look at that next), .xml, literally all the crawlable files. You can include keywords in any downloads or usable files such as mp3, and it can’t hurt. But seeing as they aren’t listed openly by google they *shouldn’t* help.

Within Literal files typically speaking use ” - ” to split words rather than ” _ “. Matt cutts mentions that google is slowly including the latter but for now I would stick with the ” - “.

Use the keywords bluntly, I haven’t heard yet of someone being penalised for using keywords in filenames. But as per usual don’t over do it - stick to 3/4 words at most.

Heres a few examples:

• product_info.php - - - > product-cat-flap.php
• car123.jpg —> toyota-supra-1996.jpg
• and so on….

This is fairly obvious once you think about it, and once in the habit you will find yourself automatically renaming things before they get uploaded.

The other key tool in your arsenal should be a healthy knowledge of Mod Re-Write ( I only personally know linux mod-re-write stuff so for other environments you may have to seek alternatives. )

Mod Re-Write allows you to use one address to effectively display another. e.g. you could have ” www.aaa.com/rss/ ” showing the file which is actually present in ” www.aaa.com/rssfeeds/001.xml “. This is a great way to tidy everything up but shouldn’t be relied on as a permanent solution for all urls as there are situations where it is overly complicated to integrate.

I will write a whole piece about mod re-write and file structures in the coming weeks as I have developed a few useful tricks that cope with css directory problems and such (although php understands where the root file is css uses the address in the bar which can cause lost file problems.

Needless to say use mod re-write to tidy up messy long extensions and files you would rather remain numbered etc. e.g. you can have files numbered 001.php, 002.php if u really want - and just use mod-rewrite too add the keywords to the address. It should be noted that search engines can tell if you are using mod re-write, but typically they don’t seem to penalise you.

Technical Points to the above

Just a few points to read before you start packing your filenames with chunky keyword goodness.

• Complicated or longer filenames can be a pain when linking around the site for small sites < 50 pages just be careful and get a bot too check all your links are spelt correctly.
• For bigger sites and Database driven sites there is a few things I would suggest:
• • The cleanest way to do this is effectively to assign a unique text to each entry instead of a number (also called a slug.) e.g. the database would have products 1 - 10 and use id’s 1 - 10. Adding another unique text field that can include [a-z A-Z - _ ] allows a file to identify the record its meant to show.
  • Wordpress describes this as Permalink structure - that is it uses mod re-write to pretty up the address of posts. This can be easily implemented in any database driven site.
  • I would recommend building a good automated slug creating script - that is it takes a new product, blog entry, whatever added to the database and works out 3-4 good keywords to describe it - that haven’t been used yet in the database. e.g. take a page advertising ” nike sport shoes ” and come up with ” nike-sport-shoes “.
  • Write Mod re-write to accept “www.mrmanshoes.com/products/ *anything* ” and to either pass *anything* onto the php file as a GET or write a bit of code in the php file to digest the url to get it.
  • This is a real example of .htaccess mod rewrite I use:
    • RewriteRule ^jobs-(([a-zA-Z0-9-])*)/$ /job_wall.php?id=$1
  • Basically it takes whatever is added to ” jobs-*here* ” and sends it as a GET variable to the php file.
  • so instead of job_wall.php searching for an ID I just set it too search for the unique bit of text I would have used in the space of *here*.

There are other ways to deal with this - but for a basic planned solution I would recommend this.

If people are interested I could write a small example .php, .sql and .htaccess but its fairly strait forward.

That concludes this piece on pumping your filenames with a little more keyspice, next I think I will look at a few more SEO related planning aspects to give you the extra edge in seo prepping your new site.

I have built a fair few sites over the last few years, probably 5-10 big projects in 3 years. So I thought I’d start laying down some basic foundations and principles, almost as a self finesse’ing practice. If they are useful to anyone else -even better. Comments are all appreciated and additions welcome.

As these points will largely be theory, they should apply to most sites, from 10 page mini sites to 10,000 page information hubs, web2.0 multi nationals etc.

We start with Site Operatives, primarily because the planning of the whole thing should come first, resist the urge to ‘just get started’ or to fly produce the site. This can be done for small sites, but even though planning seems boring it might save you the odd hour or complicated workaround later.

So before you lay a single line of code you should pretty much know the intention behind that code. So I will start with the basic planning areas - Site Operatives, File Structure, Database/Backend, Navigation, requirements etc.

Site Operatives:

Essentially these are the actions your site will do, register users, display profile pages, tag links -whatever.

So lay them down - plan every action in basic, then providing higher detail. For Example “Registering”:

Register user details

Register Landing Page - > if they opt in - > Get thier Input data - > Check it - > if correct save it down else back - > log them in -> Say ‘Welcome’

So how many of these can you think of - your site may have 5, 50 or 500. It will be more than you initially estimate - this is a maxim that generally applies to 80% of web development, in fact most things - it will Always take longer than you expect.Here is a list of 20 odd common ‘operatives’ used in sites.

Registering, logging in, editing details, logging out, posting comments, add advertisements, add friends, view profile, internal mail other users, recover lost password, gallery functions, forums, payment, shopping carts, catergoriesm uploading files, writing, SEO etc.

Establishing these operatives that you intend to use in your site will give you the ability to forplan each one and how they are to integrate.

From this you should be able to establish how much of the site will be custom and how much will be public/private written modules, projects, plugins or themes and how you intend to integrate them. You can save a lot of time and money by simply including pre-written code for the basics of your site. Large Examples include phpBB (forums), Gallery 2 (image gallerys), Wordpress (bloggage) but there are a million scripts and modules out there - some will be gnu (public liscense) - which to advise is often better than paying for coding - as it is all open people tend to have more obvious code - well commented and errors are often fixed by others.

Off the Shelf can be great, but take time shopping. Find something with parts your familar with - e.g. if you know php don’t opt for the ASP version.

Integration itself is a key too choosing your modules, contributions, plugins etc because conflicts can occur, systems can argue, fight and smash a whole lot of stuff up. So search google for the two plugins you will operate together e.g. Oscommerce and HSBC eSecure - if there’s 100,000 sites and the majority seem to say ‘don’t touch this combination without a spare year’ then look for alternatives. I will go more into integration when I get too the implementation.