There now, my titles are getting better..

I was thinking we might take a minute to offer a few of the best ideas for working faster, building leaner, or whatever made you go, "OMG, that was cool."

If we get it right, it could provide everyone with a few new tools and ideas, because they needn't be specifically solicited by a particular thread, just neat tools and tricks (that aren't your own proprietary genius, which shouldn't be necessary..)

I'll give it a try, since it was my bright idea:

• Source ordering - Since you control where elements are positioned in your CSS anyway, you can call them in the order that benefits your appeal to search engines.  Page specific header, then Body, then nav and so on



• Scripts for graphics programs - In PSP and I imagine in Photo Shop, you can record a series of steps and save it as a script which can later be run on another image, which in my case, saves 10 minutes every time I click the button..



• Includes - Lots of potential here. Let's say with regard to navigation. If you have 100 pages and you add a navigation selection, remove and replace is one option. If you're using an include on all similar pages, you make the change once. No errors and much faster.

Thanks a lot for the tip with include. I was searching for a solution for menus

I love source ordering, have been doing it for years.

I'm not the graphic designer - but i used to enjoy spending hours / days on 3D modeling and animation projects (?)

includes - I'm a php programmer so yes, includes are very useful.

I'll add to the list with:

Templating - I have 1 html file for the entire site, with php tags like <?= content['title'] ?> in place.
I then include the template at the bottom of the page that creates the web output.

The html file makes all the calls to the external CSS and JS, so all i have to do to alter the entire site layout is one html file and 2 CSS files

Copy and Paste shortcuts, press "ctrl - c" to copy, "ctrl - v" to paste.... it saves hours of clicking this is over a few months of course Brilliant little trick for html...

its an attempt

DMX wrote:

Includes - Lots of potential here. Let's say with regard to navigation. If you have 100 pages and you add a navigation selection, remove and replace is one option. If you're using an include on all similar pages, you make the change once. No errors and much faster.

I've been wanting to make my navigation an SSI for quite a while but the thing that has stopped me, is the fear that it may hurt on page SEO.  Maybe Im just paranoid...

Does anyone know if  having your nav as a separate file would affect things?

Roxane wrote:

DMX wrote:

Includes - Lots of potential here. Let's say with regard to navigation. If you have 100 pages and you add a navigation selection, remove and replace is one option. If you're using an include on all similar pages, you make the change once. No errors and much faster.

I've been wanting to make my navigation an SSI for quite a while but the thing that has stopped me, is the fear that it may hurt on page SEO.  Maybe Im just paranoid...

Does anyone know if  having your nav as a separate file would affect things?

The main deal is ensuring the TITLE and META Descriptions (the head code) is NOT in the includes. If so it gives a uniform header and that's is not good fer SEO

These days, almost everything is CMS driven.. it is easier to manage site wise as well as SEO aspects. It also makes a site far more extensible.  It also provides strong internal linking and file structures that are good for SEO (harder to screw up)

From a 10 page site to 100 page site...  In Canada we say, Oui, oui oui - CMS is da way for me..

OK, that is good news.

Let me just confirm this once more....

Having my text navigation as a separate file will NOT hurt on-page SEO in any way!

Did i miss something.........?

I've always thought that text navigation was a good seo thing, to be highly promoted among SEO advice givers

The coolest thing I've seen lately was on Intel's website.  They have "smart" redirects.  What I mean by "smart" is that if your browser's user agent is set to mimic google bot, then you get a search engine friendly 301, but if your user agent is a regular browser user agent, then you get a friendly page that explains that the page you're looking for has moved along with a nice meta refresh to push you along to the correct page in a few seconds.  Really cool, cause a 301 is confusing to a user some times when they're expecting a certain page.

Sorry I only have one slick thing - not three.  Maybe I can think of more later.

Northie wrote:

Did i miss something.........?

I've always thought that text navigation was a good seo thing, to be highly promoted among SEO advice givers

it is a good thing, gypsey is saying if you do use common text navigation, then be sure you don't accidentally use common meta tags.

Northie wrote:

Did i miss something.........?

I've always thought that text navigation was a good seo thing, to be highly promoted among SEO advice givers

Sorry Northie!  I know that made no sense at all.  I have edited my post to what it should have read "as an external file"

Hi everyone,
      I posted a message yesterday about Includes... Northie read it becuase he resonded, but I'm not sure if anyone else did. Recently did some SEO for a company and they used the "include virtual" code for their menu bar. Previously none of their pages were indexed, not even the home page. After I google did a crawl, none of the other pages were indexed, only the main page.

So I'm thinking since all the other internal links were in a "include virtual" external file, they never got crawled or indexed.

Can anyone shed some light on this? Am i right? Should i never use SSI "include virtual" again?

Right now I use it mostly for the footer, I don't want to make the full change untill I know for sure.

Managing a site with a static HTML nav menu is a nightmare unless you only have a few pages. I tried it once in hopes that my targeted keywords, which were my nav menu , would  help my rank with google. It may have, but as the site grew and new links needed to be added my motivation to update really suffered. I redid the site  with an ASP /access DB  menu and concentrated on off page critirea for SEO. So far so good .. Regarding onpage criteria, I think concentrating on the right mix of keywords in <h1>, <h2> tags, <title> etc.. along with the same keywords included in your content should give good results. Assuming your keywords and content are well researched...

Kerry
www.wulongtea-info.com

NeoGeo17 wrote:

Hi everyone,
      I posted a message yesterday about Includes... Northie read it becuase he resonded, but I'm not sure if anyone else did. Recently did some SEO for a company and they used the "include virtual" code for their menu bar. Previously none of their pages were indexed, not even the home page. After I google did a crawl, none of the other pages were indexed, only the main page.

So I'm thinking since all the other internal links were in a "include virtual" external file, they never got crawled or indexed.

Can anyone shed some light on this? Am i right? Should i never use SSI "include virtual" again?

Right now I use it mostly for the footer, I don't want to make the full change untill I know for sure.

you can use it if you want to - its server side so it doesn't matter

the important thing is that you're just using it for the navigation - if you're using it for meta tags and headings, probably too much duplicated content