PHP Search Optimization Best Practices

While search engine optimization (SEO) remains a broad topic that applies to nearly any site, there are important PHP-specific techniques to optimizing a PHP-based site. This guide provides an overview to best coding practices that can help streamline the code and presentation of your site for search engines.

Although there is no single best practice for PHP SEO, there are important principles which can improve the performance of your PP-based site within the search rankings. You should always put performance and quality (user experience) issues ahead of search optimization, but the two concerns increasingly overlap over time. As search engine algorithms evolve in complexity, it becomes even more important to put quality considerations first when designing and developing a new site.

One of the primary SEO factors to consider when developing a new site is the load time and performance of a given site. Keeping high quality, scalable performance on your site at a high level over time is an important part of effectively scaling your brand to the next level. While your users may be frustrated by performance lags as your site grows, slow load times and limited availability will also limit your search rankings and indexation of new content. As a result, your efforts to properly and effectively scale a new site are an important factor in helping to increase search rankings over time.

The single most effective method to improve the speed, load time and performance on your site is to optimize an MVC (modern view controller) structure so you can optimize each element of the code base from the front end design to the business logic to the database. Following best practices in terms of your database construction – write logical, clean code based upon database best practices. For example, you want to logically name your database fields rather than having to SELECT a certain field over time – this can result in improved database performance over time.

Another important factor that impacts your search rankings and indexation are the URLs and content structure on your site. Many PHP-based sites cookie users or remember preferences based upon PHP session codes. A standard URL from a PHP-based site might look like SITE.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=string. As a result, this can make it challenging from a search engine to properly index a site given the wide variety of Session IDs and parameters contained within. In order to improve the quality of indexing and rankings you can disable session IDs by adding the following lines to your .htaccess file:

php_flag session.use_trans_sid off

While this is an important first step toward improving the quality of your URLs, you should also work to optimize your URLs for a logical structure with proper keywords. By default, many PHP URLs contain a wide variety of variables that make them dynamic even if they no longer contain session IDs. In order to more effectively implement mod rewrite on your sites you should aim to utilize the Apache mod_rewrite  engine in order to clean up the appearance of URLs within your site.

External Links

• http://www.webmaster9.com/2010-06/essential-webmaster-tools-for-search-engine-optimization.html
• http://www.potstuck.com/2010/03/19/php-seo-sitemaps-and-robots-txt/