Php and google etc...

sal

Don't know if this is the right place to ask this type of question. If not, sorry.

Otherwise:

Are there any steps to be taken in consideration when publishing a php website so as to enable it to be found by search engines en general and google in particular?

I am not talking about page optimization, rather steps to consider such as special characters (question marks (?) etc...

I am very new to php and I have questions which may seem very basic:

Is it better to construct a html page and insert php code?

If I want to populate html title (and other) tags from a table, will these values be read by the search engines?

I know that php generates html code (at least I think) in reaction to a dynamic action of a surfer (ie clicking on a search button) but will search engine stop at that level and not continue deeper?

Lots of questions I know. Any input would be appreciated.

packland

I'm pretty new to php but i think this will help.

Once you submit a site to a seach engine it will typically spider the site intermittently and read what is listed in the META content field of the pages submitted and probably the content information from other pages that can be reached by links within the site. it uses this info to index information about your site.

For all questions the search engine sees what you see when you 'view source' ie. The search engines see what all users see which is html.

There are no special attibutes of php pages (except they end in .php) at this level (? is not peculiar to php but to http). What your php code and apache server does with the request is the special bit which hopefully outsiders including search engines can't see. they just get the html output.

When coding the main thing is to try and keep the php in larger chunks (for readability and i think speed also)

ryclem

When designing a page that includes header.php, sidebar.php, and footer.php files... which pages do you optimize?

I know that when you "view source" on the browser that it puts the pages all together, but which one or should all of them contain the appropriate meta tags, etc.?

If only the main page, then should I strip out the title, head and meta tags from the includes?

Does it even matter... I don't want to confuse the SE spiders...

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ryan