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I am new to XOOPS and am building one of my domains around this CMS for the first time. I have been reading the forum for the past few days and slowly building my new site - thank you to all the developers for a fine product and the experts who have been answering questions with clear guidance to the various questions posed.
I am going to attempt to condense SEO in a few short paragraphs - I read, test and practice SEO as a hobby - it is ever changing which makes it fun :) So, in a nut shell;
I have seen modules/hacks available to change some of the SEO important on-page aspects but haven't settled on what one to use. The most important on-page SEO component is the Title tag (the title of the page not to be confused with the title attribute, title=""). Though testing I believe the first 3 words of the title tag are the most important, I believe repeating words in the title tag words to "devalue" the word which is repeated in the title. Each page of your site is an individual landing page and should be optimized separately based on the content of the page - your site may be about a broad topic when you consider it in total - each page is about a single piece of the topic (hope that makes sense). That being said, having your site name in every title doesn't do you much good.
Header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) are also important and should be utilized. Each page should have only a single h1 tag and should be a variant of the title tag, avoid making the h1 and title the same.
I should have listed this first - Keyword research - before creating a page you should make sure you are optimizing your page with keywords/phrases which people are actually searching for! If your a Firefox user I highly recommend the "SEO for Firefox" plug in to assist in your research.
Do not get hung up on meta keywords - Google and MSN bots ignore the keyword meta. Yahoo does collect the data but through testing I have determined it will not help you in SERP placement. The media bots (AdSense, etc) do read the keyword meta to assist in determining the ads that should be placed - do understand that your page content is accomplishing the same thing - also, you must ensure if you do use the keyword meta that the keywords are relevant to the content! (This is off topic but could cause you problems if spammed and irrelevant words). For the results of my testing search Google for "meta keyword test conclusions" (my page should be number one :))
Meta description - I personally only use the meta description when there is VERY little content on the page itself like those with mainly images. The search engines are very good at taking snippets of content from the actual content on the page based on the search completed by the searcher so don't waste the time (IMO) creating a great description - heh, if it is that great it should be in the content people can see! Search engines are doing just that, basing the search results (serps) on actual page content you can see when the page is parsed and are moving away from content people cannot see, makes sense if you think about it.
Google Page Rank (PR). There is actually two values, first the Toolbar PR - it is ONLY a reflection/indication of the links to the page itself! It updates about every 110 days or so, only Google knows when. It has nothing to do with page design or content. A PR-0 page CAN and a lot of times do out rank pages in SERPs with a much higher PR.
The "other" PR, it is ever changing and is a part of the Google algorithm. Nobody outside Google knows exactly what makes up the algo completely but there are very strong indications that the importance of the things I discussed earlier are important for on-page but the most important thing which seems to out-rank all of them combined is the anchor text used in a link to the page from a relevant, authority site. For an easy example search the word "website" in Google and you will see Starbucks in the page one results and the funny thing is you will be hard pressed to find the word website on the page itself - looking at the links to the site and reviewing the anchor text used you will see the word used occasionally with is telling Google those sites think Starbucks is a authority (in the referring sites opinion) for the word.
Yahoo and MSN follow much of the same rules but these two engines seem to consider W3C compliance - it is my experience they don't like poorly coded pages.
Duplicate content can be an issue, search engines will attempt to figure out which is the original, you can help your self by ensuring that the duplicate has a link back to the original (when a pdf is created a link back should be automatic - have not looked at this yet). Also, solve for your www and non-www versions of your site - you can tell Google in webmaster tools (that only takes care of Google) or you can place some simple code in your domain htaccess from this page navycs.com/links.html (ensure you make code changes to reflect your domain and extension where necessary).
Links FROM your site matter! Ensure you are not linking to bad neighborhoods or banned sites. The sites you link to is a reflection of your sites credibility and could/will hurt your "trust rank (TR)" (TR is an element of the "other" PR). I have not found a hack/module to place rel="nofollow" in comments/posts in CBB and other modules available for Xoops, it is built in to WordPress. If there is one please point me to it!
Sorry for the long post, I'll try not to be so long winded in the future. To summarize I am looking for a title hack and nofollow hack to accomplish what I discussed :) Thank you in advance!
Tom
