First of all: Pardon my bad english. :)

I open this topic coz I want to read other experience about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Xoops, and Xoops modules.

My experience is like this:
I'm running a bunch of sites, so some of them I optimize for search engines (Google ), some not (depends of client's needs). I realize that the most of Xoops modules and themes are not SEO out-of-the box.

Themes:
First of all, the most themes have problem with Heading tags such as <h1..4>. The key is to have only one <h1> tag on the page and it must be before <h2> tag. Also, img alt="" tag is missing in most cases and image width and height tag.

Modules:
There are very little modules that are SEO ready. What I mean by SEO?

Title of the page - Yes, you could change it in theme, but: Depends of what you want to put in a first plan, my personal experience (that works) is to put a title of the eg. article first, then sub/category then the title of the website.

Example: SEO tools for XOOPS | Xoops tips'n'tricks | MyXoopsSEO.com

It's far better then eg:
MyXoopsSEO.com | Xoops tips'n'tricks | SEO tools for XOOPS

Meta description tags - There was an issue with AMS3 and meta description tags. Yes, they are relevant. Google reads them till it analize the whole page. So every module should have unique meta description tags for every single page that it generates with an option to enter your own description.

Some of this could be (unique meta desc.) dine in theme adding title of the page before xoops default meta description, but it's the second best thing. :)

Links in modules - Rarely there are title="" tags on links in modules and it's templates. This is also a must. in title tag should be a name of article or first characters xxx of the articles. That's why the news module is so good. Without many SEO features, this one is good job.

URL rewrite aka clean url aka SEF - There are modules with this option, but the main problem is that you get something like this:

category.item.232/the-article-name.html

It's more SEO friendly to have name-of-the-category/the-article-name.html

or just: www.website.com/the-article-name.html

There is an argue that SEF urls are not relevant for seo. It's true, they are not SO relevant, but every keyword more is relevant, and I'm telling you this from my personal experience.

RSS and sitemap - Every module should have rss or a plugin for rss module. This is because you can submit you rss feed as sitemap in google webmasters tools. Also, we need a good sitemap module. We have one, it's nice, but it should be upgraded.

There is a lot more about XOOPS and SEO, but this is a MUST before any keyword stiffing and other more advanced techniques.

I use that every module and theme developer/designer should be considerate this when making it's product. I repeat that this is my presonal experience that is proven in practice.

Now, let me hear you experience. We are all here to learn. :)

there is some seo way to edit the publisher/smartsection url...

so it can be something like

www.yourdomain.com/widgets/ or www.yourdomain.com/widgets/blue-widgets.html

see this

https://xoops.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=245632

but it is still not working in my site...still trying to figure this out



anyone successfully implement this ?

Url rewrite is working for me aka SEF links in smartsection/publisher. :)

SEF is just a part of seo and it's notice to all developers and users.

This topic is something like "How we could make Xoops more SEO firendly"

No one is interested in improving Xoops SEO features? No body have experience to share?

I have never found Xoops to be an obstacle to getting good SEO results. In my experience, most modules are correctly spidered provided (as you point out) articles have well constructed title and meta descriptions.

Use of heading tags is also important, but most WYSIWYG editors allow these tags, plus you can hack the Xoops DHTML editor to recognise H1, H2 etc., although it would be nice to have this as a standard feature.

The only real chore is debugging modules to make them W3C valid. I'm sure that validation is less significant for high-traffic sites, but a valid site adds another brownie point to the search engine scorecard. The htmlValidator plugin for Firefox is really useful (this page currently has 110 errors, but it increases with each post).

I do use URL re-writing on a couple of non-Xoops sites. It doesn't cause a problem but I cannot say for sure whether it actually makes any difference to SEO. From what I understand, Google don't encourage the use of re-written URL's and I found conflicting opinions as to the benefits of using re-writes or Pathinfo. I would certainly be interested to see the results of a test, provided it was truly independent and not part of some SEO company's hype.

At the end of the day, although there are guidelines for module developers, there are no enforced requirements. So, a module might validate, it might not. It might build titles and meta tags dynamically, or it might use the same tag as the site pref on every page.

It might work, or....

Hehe. :)

This is my example. I start running a website in september 2009. The problem was that there was other 10 websitees with same thematics. My chances were poor.

I started with Articles module. I've found it pretty. But! There was no some features (that I don't remember now) so I switched to smartsection.

I hacked smartsection a little to fit my own needs, but since that I'm not a programmer - there is a lot of work to do.

From what I've done - I became one of top 5 websites, and no 1. if you search some other keywords.

I had a little time to became popular since that I was in Google's sandbox, but I've made it, even in sandbox

Eventually, Google will index every viewable page on the internet. The problem is in rank of those pages. That's why I've opened this topic.

Every module should have easy indexable page with propper tags. Few modules have title= tag in a href tags with description or title of the link, etc.. I've said it in the first post. :)

My opinion:

What really matters is unique and fresh content.
I have 10 pages that drive 2000 unique visitors to my site but the most important are the 20 000 pages driving one visitor each.

I would choose quantity instead of quality, but again, unique content.

But of course, you can only have unique and fresh content with users helping you, and to have users, you have to provide unique and fresh content. The problem for me, is to engage people to publish on the site and keep them engaged.
After you get a snow ball effect (when people come just because others are coming), the top results will come without effort.

Yup! As they say about SEO 'Content is the king!', but there are many tips and tricks how to be even better! That's what I'm talking about. :)