How can I optimize my site for the best search engine result

[groggory]

I am completely re-doing my website for many reasons, but one is because I want better pagerank. Please give any tips on this, and I'll list what I'm thinking about too.

• Do not use a catalog directory under your root. Put your catalog directly at your root.
• Do not use proprietary model numbers. I am using the UPC code as a model number. I am also going to add a table to the database and keep track of ISBN. Most manufacturers use the last section of a UPC as their model number, so I'm going to parse that number out, and put it as a field onto each product description
• In your page titlebar, do not put contact information. Instead, use to describe your site
• Put good articles on your site. I am going to add PHPNuke to my site and try and develop a community. In addition to the traffic it will bring, I want to develop good articles and put them on the PHPNuke side
• Link to your site from any similar sites you can
• Talk to your mfg's and see if they'll list your website on their list of resellers. Cross linking rocks
• Invest in a google adwords campaign
• As your store starts out, think about getting an ebay store too. That way you can get your name out via ebay search results, and sometimes search engines will hit

I can't think of much more off the top of my head, but please add to this. I think this thread is useful to everyone

[michael_s]

That is pretty much all the biggies. I really do not see anything major missing except for manually adding tags to meta_tags.php...

[Redeye_Joe]

how hard would it be for me to move my catalog to the root, I have already installed it in the catalog/ directory, and I get a poor page rating. Wondering if this could be the major problem?

[michael_s]

In my experience w/google, it makes little difference where you site is located, root or catalog. The thing that makes the most difference is inbound links. If high ranking sites link to your site, all your pr's will go up. Also, if you have a lot of inbound links.

And of course, your page content needs to be relevant and deep.

You can do a simple .htaccess directory index that points to catalog/index.php from your site's root and that will serve up your catalog's index page as if it were in the root dir.

If you really want to move it up a level, just ssh to the server, copy the contents of the catalog dir to your www root, then edit both configure.php files that you just copied and remove all references to /catalog in the paths.

Then test it out to be sure it is working. Finally, delete the catalog dir.

Through SSH it should take less than 10 minutes to do.

[Redeye_Joe]

I have an index.html page, so I cant have it directed to my catalog page directly, but I could still put it in the root and repoint the links on the index.html page? Would that have the same effect?? And sorry but what is SSH?

[groggory]

It's basic getting a command line access on your server. You would use a program like putty, but your host has to support SSH