General question about coding PHP and SEO.

[pearljamming]

I've coded a bit of PHP in the past, but it was all very general. Being able to make websites have been a big interest of mine ever since the Netscape and Yahoo's Geocities days. Since then I've learned both CSS HTML but never really got much further than that because I felt like it was a lost cause. The reason I feel like this is because it seems that web developers are a dime a dozen and trying to make a few extra dollars here and there would be difficult. But maybe I'm wrong, that's why I've decided to join this community and hopefully get some positive feedback not only about the industry but also on what would be the best move for me.

 

I want to create a site to publish online but I'm not sure what the best way to go about doing is. I've tried doing a blog with a blog/website application provided by host gator but it really fell through because there were many other websites blogging about the same exact thing and I couldn't even get on the top 100 pages of any of the top search engines, even after months.

 

Now I'm thinking about just coding everything my own since I have strong CSS/HTML skills, but I don't want to publish anything with out some JS and PHP/MYSQL. The problems I face is that I don't know what drive into this again with out knowing that I can get to the front pages on the top search engines. Furthermore, I don't know much JS and PHP/MYSQL. So maybe my best option is to make random nonsense websites locally until proficient and then moving forward to understanding SEO?

 

I appreciate any comments regarding my situation. Just to clarify I care more about being on the front pages of the search engines than I do making any money. Being at the top will give me a greater since of accomplishment and keep me going. I despise websites that riddle themselves with adds everywhere and I don't want to be like that. At the same time having some sort of income somehow would be cool.

[QuickOldCar]

In the old days of when there was just a few thousand websites to now over a billion...is a need for more web designers and developers.

Just as any business is hard to become on top, all you can do is try your best, create a portfolio of your work and let your reputation do the rest.

 

Is a lot of "seo gimmicks" out there, when the search engines catch on they change how they rank a site.

 

For basic seo and tips that help:

pretty urls defining what your link is about including the title in it as a slug

when writing posts/articles place the important words first in the title

additional meta information head of your pages, besides meta can additionally include opengraph or oembed data

a well structured site with plenty of links to be scraped and search engines are able to follow

try to avoid javascript or jquery links and dropdowns, use css for dropdowns and normal links

sitemap of your urls can help

latest feeds on categories your site

use the most relevant keywords first and don't overdo it

try to keep your site fast loading, speed does matter with ranking

keep articles fresh and always creating new ones

backlinks help, link to others and let them link back to you as well, it's not just quantity but also quality

if you don't see yourself in a search engine or an index add yourself, there are also free services that will add you to many of them

create a robots.txt file the root of your site and let the crawlers know it's allowed

content of your websites will matter, can't force people to be interested in something they are not

use captions and keywords if have them for all your images

use absolute urls for links, helps with backlinks and some crawlers can't always fix the relative urls correctly

avoid redirects if possible

 

No matter if you make a site on your own or use a popular cms, all the above advice works.

Try giving wordpress a go, there is a wealth of seo plugins and others for free besides the site is structured well for seo to start with.

[Csharp]

I wanna give you the same advice Google gives you. Don't build your website for the search engines, build it for the users.

 

Search engines are built towards helping users finding what they want, and if that's your website - they'll find it. If you're gonna start a website thinking how to SEO it, you're definitely doing it wrong and doomed not to rank.

 

Watch this video. Specially the 2 minute mark is interesting to you.

 

If you just wanna blog you can try any of the popular platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr or Medium. Even a simple Facebook page would do the job.