Help: Best PHP site layout for SEO

[koopkoop]

I'm putting together an e-commerce store and I was wondering which site structure is more SEO friendly.

 

The site consists of a navigation bar on the left with all the product categories. The centre portion is dedicated to a thumbnail grid which displays the product details (Picture, description,price etc.)depending on the category selected from the left.

 

The site structures I'm conisdering are (please correct me, if there's alternates that I'm not aare of, as I'm new to this):

 

Option 1)

Site consists of three pages - Home, Product Thumbnail Grid and Detailed Product View

 

Home page will have the navigation bar pass url variables to the generic grid which will then display the content. Therefore, one grid handles the display of ALL product categories.

 

Option 2)

Site consists of multiple pages - Home, Product Thumbnail Grid (One for each product category) and Detailed Product View

 

Home page will have the navigation bar link directly to a dedicated page for each product. The PHP code will be embedded in each page to pull the appropriate product category. Yes, I'm aware of the maintainence issues with this, but that's beside the point.

 

 

 

 

Is there any SEO benefit to going with one option over the other or is it all the same to a search engine (most importantly Google)?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[947740]

I would take into consideration that google accounts for less than half the percentage of searches.

 

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156451

[koopkoop]

^ Thanks. For now though, I'm more concerned with my original question rather than search engine usage stats.

[SharkBait]

Remember that search engines don't like websites that are built for them. Websites should be built for your intended audience.

You could create the URLs to be human readable IE:

 

  myplace.com/page?id=339&view=kitchen&man=LG   

 

might want to look something like: 

 

  myplace.com/products/kitchen/fridges/LG54e

 

Remember Content is King - Search Engines bots crawl your webpage in text. Load up Lynx as a browser and see how your site looks in all text (or strip your CSS to remove graphics/styles etc).

 

Use proper tags - H1, H2, h3, <strong> etc to place emphase on things

 

997740 - Sure Google accounts for less than 50%, but 49.2% is still a BIG gap from the next engine being Yahoo at 23.8%.

 

 

[koopkoop]

^OK.

 

Can anyone directly answer my original question though?

 

What are the advantages/disadvantages between the multi-page and 3 page layout?

 

In relation to the post above:

 

My "Option 1" would look like:

www.mysite.com/products?category=mugs

 

My "Option 2" would look like:

 

www.mysite.com/products/mugs

 

Would the increase in pages generated by going with Option 2 help though?

 

 

 

[Dragen]

I'm currently writing my own shop and this is how I have it set up:

my index.php runs virtually everything.

 

basically I have the index.php which displays the homepage, with a category list down the left hand side.

When you click a category it reloads index.php?c=category name

So it then displays the items for the category. Clicking on an item would lead to:

index.php?c=category name&i=item id

 

I mask it all with htaccess modrewrite though, so forexample, this link:

mydomain.co.uk/index.php?c=jewellery&i=243

would look like this:

mydomain.co.uk/jewellery/243/

 

So it is seo friendly and runs from only one file. I have other files to run things such as a contact form, accounts and payment processing etc, but the base of the store is on one page.

[koopkoop]

^Cool. I may go that way too, if I end up going with my Option #1

 

While your choice is the easiest to manage, did you ever investigate the SEO perspective of such a structure? I'm just wondering if having a lot of real pages has any SEO benefits over a single page which handles everything.

 

On another note, do you have a good article that explains how to go about masking the messy php URL with a clean one? What would a guy Google for to read up on how to do that? Any chance you can send me an example

[Dragen]

to my knowledge search engines will class each link as a separate page as they only realy see the url i the ulrbar and not the actual url. So it shouldn't effect it apart from improving the seo if the url rewriting is used correctly.

 

There are plenty of examples of using htaccess for modrewrite to make the urls 'clean'. I'd suggest googling modrewrite and htaccess.

I'll give you an example of the code that I use. It's a bit messy, as I'm no htaccess guru:

#turns the rewrite engine on to allow url rewriting
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

#this will make the 'clean' url rewrite to the actual url behind the scenes
RewriteRule ^([a-z\-\/\ ]+)(/([0-9\-\ ]+)/?)?$ index.php?c=$1&i=$3 [NC,L]

Put the code into a text file and name it '.htaccess' (note the dot at thte beginnig MUST be there) and upload it to your root directory.

 

It checks if the url has the ca\tegory name and/or item id. If so it sends the get variables for the request.

My code does have some restrictions;

The url must be written in the following format:

mydomain.com/category name/item id

category name cannot contain numbers. Only letters a-z, spaces and - are allowed.

the item id must be numeric. Spaces are allowed though.

The item id is optional and only needed if you are viewing an item, otherwise $_GET['i'] will be blank.

 

I hope that made some sense. Let me know how yuo get on!