Web Developer to SEO
Since turning towards the search engine optimisation world I have been faced with a great change in the way that I deal with many problems that come up when creating / editing websites. I have been given great tools and add-ons which definitely help with day to day problems faced. We also use a very comprehensive CMS system which makes the whole site creation / management process a whole lot easier.
The CMS uses a template engine which is an extension of the PHP language itself called Smarty. Using Smarty gives both designers and developers the ability to redesign a web site and put it live quickly and easily. All the vital parts of the website are stored in seperate variables, for example navigation, main content. You can then simply call these items in the templates. This makes changing the features that much easier, as you can create them separately meaning the code you may be looking at is specifically for that function, and you have less chance of messing up the rest of the website, which as most web developers will know, happens from time to time when not using a good system.
Most of our sites at Position Gold use this CMS system which allows the clients the option to easily edit and add pages on their website. The Position Gold site itself runs on a highly modified version of the CMS system, which gives the ability to place blogs, news posts etc.
In the few weeks I have been here I have also learnt alot about the correct and search engine friendly ways to link to pages. This is made even easier using mod_rewrite, a module installed on most of todays web servers. The mod_rewrite module allows you to change the address people enter to view your page. For example instead of having URLs like www.myshop.com/index.php?cat1=category1&cat2=category2, which most search engines will ignore, you can have URLs like www.myshop.com/category1/category2/ or www.myshop.com/category1/category2.html. These types of URLs are much more search engine friendly, and are likely to help get higher rankings in the search results. These URLs also allow the search engines to view your products and even possibly list them in the search results, which can only help with sales and attracting more visitors to your site. The Position Gold CMS system automatically integrates this into the websites. Making all new pages added by clients have a .html extension.
The Position Gold CMS system also integrates robots.txt and the sitemap.xml, automatically updating when the client creates new pages. This is useful when it comes to search engine optimisation as you can imagine it is one less thing to worry about.
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