Recently most of the client wants to make their site seo friendly for getting good placement of their sites. I would like to know which framework is helpful to me in this. As i know codeignitor help me here, but i want more opinion for other web developer.
Thanks & Regards
php-developer
The backend framework is nowhere near as important as having something worth reading in the first place.
in fact the backend is 100% irrelevant to the seo results
That said, one's search engine ranking depends heavily on getting the appropriate keywords into the <title> tag of your html without any pollution from the framework. For example, "Free Beer" is a better title than "My Annoying Framework :: Free Beer".
It's also very important for SEO to get your keywords into the url. For example this:
http://example.com/free-beer-1234
is better than
http://example.com/content.php?id=1234
I believe Zend Framework supports this type of SEO and I've also seen it in action for various blog software.
Beyond that, it's important to have good content that other folks link to.
cretaceous;10995401 wrote:in fact the backend is 100% irrelevant to the seo results
Not true. Some backends don't bother with SEO-friendly urls, some do. I spent weeks altering a website to have SEO-friendly URLs and our page rank went up rapidly to the first page of google results.
A poor framework might ignore SEO entirely, negatively impacting your searching engine rank.
@: I believe the point trying to be made was that the choice of frameworks/backends itself is 100% irrelevant; instead, it's only the output which matters in the end.
In other words, it doesn't matter that you're using the ABC framework vs. XYZ, it just matters which one of them outputs intelligently formed HTML documents.
bradgrafelman;10995530 wrote:@: I believe the point trying to be made was that the choice of frameworks/backends itself is 100% irrelevant; instead, it's only the output which matters in the end.
I do agree that the backend is not what makes a page get a good search ranking, but I disagree that frameworks are 100% irrelevant as some have built-in and easy-to-use features and/or documentation which make SEO easier and others have none whatsoever. For example, here is an article from zend describing how to get seo-friendly urls using zend framework. It's a tiny bit involved, but better than nothing. Selection of a particular framework doesn't guarantee awesome SEO features, but such a choice can make things easier or harder.
Or maybe I'm using too broad an interpretation of the term framework to include Joomla or Wordpress which are very easy to configure with seo-friendly features.
Frameworks -> Zend, CodeIgniter
CMS -> Joomla, Wordpress
Frameworks don't actually output a site, you develop code based on the framework to output what you like.
CMS, or Content-Management Systems, provide a fully functiona webste, that is customizable to your needs.
When you install a framework on its own you get nothing, when you install a CMS on its own you get a fully functional website.
If using CodeIgniter, most of the SEO issues will be handled in your views: how you structure them, the markup used, etc. You can use helper functions to control things like titles and keywords that show up in the head section, and so forth. As far as the URL issues, careful selection of controller names and method names can help, along with the optional .htaccess configuration that allows you to not include the "index.php" in the URL.
E.g., if you call the controller for your web store "store" instead of "controller" and have a method in it called "search" that accepts a couple arguments (a top-level category and a sub-category to search), you could have a URL that looks like "http://example.com/store/search/mens/shirts", which is much more friendly than "http://example.com/index.php?action=search&category_id=1&subcategory_id=32".
pah - if it ain't in the framework then add it
they don't specify every piece of your output
- they might have helpers but it's not a key reason on which to choose a framework
all we're talking about here is the friendly url thing anyway - we're ignoring all the other SEO garbage of keywords on page, in h1 tags, in alt tags, in navigation...
plus targetted phrases checked against Google phrase rankings, links in, etc etc
for all of which the framework has no role to play whatsoever
The whole SEO-friendly URLs is a bit of a red herring a lot of the time. I know some SEO 'experts' see that almost as the holy grail of SEO, but in truth it's only a small part of the optimisation process. Think about it, how often do you search for the answer to some complex question to have Google give you a bunch of results with links to forums like this one, which does not use SEO-friendly URLs?
At the end of the day, there are far more important factors, and the framework has no bearing on them.
Ashley Sheridan wrote:The whole SEO-friendly URLs is a bit of a red herring a lot of the time.
I agree, but it is a good idea to have a nice URL. I find, say, http://www.php.net/array-intersect easier to recall and type than http://at.php.net/manual/en/function.array_intersect.php.
But as you say, this has nothing to do with SEO.
Ashley Sheridan;10995831 wrote:The whole SEO-friendly URLs is a bit of a red herring a lot of the time. I know some SEO 'experts' see that almost as the holy grail of SEO, but in truth it's only a small part of the optimisation process. Think about it, how often do you search for the answer to some complex question to have Google give you a bunch of results with links to forums like this one, which does not use SEO-friendly URLs?
At the end of the day, there are far more important factors, and the framework has no bearing on them.
I disagree on both points. I altered the urls on my website to be more expressive of their content (i.e., they matched the titles, minus puncutation) and my site went from being perhaps 50 or 100 in google rankings to being in the top 3 results. There are other factors, of course, but I think these urls really do matter a lot. Others may disagree, but this has been my experience.
As for the framework -- It is also my opinion that it does matter. Although Joomla and Wordpress are actually CMSes, they do have a lot of underlying features in the domain of frameworks: database abstraction, authentication, etc. That they have additional features not in the realm of framework means perhaps that they are more than <i>just</i> a framework. Perhaps we need a venn diagram? And Zend framework -- obviously a framework -- has features that assist with using SEO-friendly urls. The urls that your web server responds to are only half a matter of your html output. They are also half in the realm of your site's architecture and API with the outside world.
EDIT: I meant to contract frameworks that assist with SEO either via code structure, sample .htaccess files, or documentation with the one I had to deal with in my first paragraph. This old beast of a site had hundreds of thousands of data-driven urls and the framework/cms had no features whatsoever to assist with seo-urls. Altering its structure to get seo-friendly urls was a 6-week-long process, and quite arduous at that. Had we started with Zend framework (or used a CMS like Joomla or Wordpress) we would have avoided that entirely.
I am not saying that SEO-friendly URLs help, just that they're often not as big a factor as some people think. I've not had the performance boost you've experienced by switching to using them, but I have had excellent boosts by just organising my content better and using correct headings and links, etc.
you are also little bit right, but if the url is seo friendly then it is really cached by search engine and also help in to get good keyword ranking....
The "friendliness" of the URL has nothing to do with caching by search engines, that's a problem with dynamic URLs that change for a given page over time, i.e. a blog with paginated results where old articles are pushed back onto different URLs.
The keyword ranking is A factor, but only a small one in when it comes to URLs. Other placements of keywords feature much more prominently, such as in the title of a page or the actual body text of the page.
Making your URLs friendly won't hurt, but at best the time could be better spent elsewhere if all you want is search engine results.
you're right Ashley... i really appreciate with your explanation... thanks
