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

Hehehe!

This ought to be an interesting thread to watch.

Thanks for the great post Tom!

I don't have much to add to this thread except that XOOPS needs a complete overhaul in the SEO department. The only way I was ever able to do well in search engines with XOOPS was to do a lot of custom coding in the theme and some core hacks to add nofollow.

I hope developers will sit up and take notice of threads like this because poor SEO is one of the big components in why XOOPS is getting smoked by less capable systems like Wordpress.

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Thanks for the compliment. Do you have a hack wrote up for the nofollow? Would save a ton of time :)

I don't have a packaged hack, but I can tell you where you need to hack the core to convert URLs to use nofollow.

Go into /class/module.textsanitizer.php and start looking around line 125. It's pretty straight forward to mod.

HTH

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Thanks, got that working for the user added urls (www. and http direct input) - took me a while to find where to provide the nofollow for the [url= java added urls - had to modify the /Frameworks/textsanitizer/module.textsanitizer.php in the same fashion.

No to figure out how to have users earn the right to have a follow link... :)

You could do a conditional statement based on post count or group membership. That would be the easiest way of I can think of.

This is a very interesting thread. I was unaware of James hack to the textsanitizer. This in its self was worth the price of admission!

It makes you wonder what else can be done to the code to help with SEO.

NavyCS emphasizes some very good points - start looking at your title in your browser and reading your content!

There are a few approaches to SEO, and I am interested to see where this one goes...

A couple of things I would like to point out -

1. For you to have a successful web site, people need to do more than just visit your web site. If visits was the #1 goal, just let the spammers take over your site

2. If the number of visits/hits is not the goal, what is? The goal is quality visits. Once the people start visiting your site, do they know what your site is about or what to do next (and you only have 3 seconds)? What will make them come back?

The advice about identifying your keywords (can you describe your site in less than 15 words?) is critical. 'My site is about me' is only 5 words, but tells me nothing. Once you have this nailed down, use it to focus everything on your site - article titles, category titles, content, module names - and I mean everything!

SEO won't make up for poor content and you can spend a lot of time and energy on SEO when you should be focusing on your web site and its content - something you probably have a lot more knowledge about than SEO. Am I right? Or, am I right?

Just like any company needs a vision and mission statement, you need one for your site, too. Start by rewriting your site title and site slogan.

Steve brings up a very good point here.

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Source: Wall, Aaron. SEO Book.

Building quality content and a healthy, active community are, IMHO, the 2 most important aspects of SEO.

That being said, if you do everything else correctly, but use SEO tactics on your site that are ancient or frowned upon, you could still find yourself de-indexed. At the very least, your site will not rank as well as it could.

The best I ever achieved with a XOOPS site was PR7 and 1st place in Google for the search term Webmaster News [broad and specific matches]. At that time, I had about 1/3rd the traffic to my site that xoops.org gets and a very small fraction of the backlinks and SERPs.

To achieve that level, I had to hack my XOOPS install, modules and themes to the point that when I finally upgraded from 2.0.13.2 to 2.0.16, a lot of things broke and I never got the site working right again.

There are NUMEROUS areas of XOOPS that need a major SEO overhaul. It's not just the core either, modules need just as much work, if not more.

What bothers me most is that MOST of the changes that are needed boil down to following the standards.

Here's just a few of the most common things that need fixed...

There should never be more than 1 h1 tag in a page, yet there are modules and themes that do that. The h2 tag should not be used for block titles, but you see it all the time (I've done that one and have since learned better). Over use of / and / dilute the emphasis you should be using for your copy, not your template. Meta keywords are virtually useless and should be pulled from every theme. Meta description is somewhat more useful, but NOT when the same description is used for every page. The Meta Title should be the 1st tag in your Meta section, it should be unique for every page and should NOT start with your site name. There should never ever ever ever be ANY hidden content on your site (font the same color as background, display:none;, really tiny font sizes, text in the background with a image layer over it, etc..). At one time or another, I've seen all of the above in XOOPS, themes, or modules.

Literally, a small book could be written on what should be changed in the XOOPS presentation layer and why.

I think this is a great topic and it is one that is certainly overdue.

Ok, I'll get down from the soapbox now.