Search Engine Optimization and php

[Ghaleon]

I am currently building a website to sell my art online. Specifically, I am customizing and setting up the shopping cart and downloading software I bought for it. It is written in php. I have just been thinking, will the fact that it is php confuse the search engines? I am thinking of integrating the rest of the site (the info about me, links section, and so on) into that same engine, since it will be simpler for the users.

Any ideas on how to optimize php code for the search engines? Or is it the same approach as optimizing html code?

[Lee]

Its exactly the same way you would any standard HTML page thankfully :thumbsup:

Chances are however, because you are using .php for your web page extensions you have a slightly better chance of being listed as Google prefers to list sites highly whose content is updated regularly and that was the basis on which .php was developed

Regards,

Lee

[retrograde]

I think it depends on the search engine and how the script using runs.

For normal PHP stuff, search engines do fine. I could have an entire site done in PHP with php extensions, and a search engine would crawl it all.

Things may have changed now, but I know for a while not all search engines would crawl an entire site if you had variables in your url (http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?go=true ). Session IDs in URLs are also a problem sometimes.

Things may have changed though. I'm not up to date on all the search engine tricks. Someone else might be able to tell you better.

But anyway, with that said... You should be able to optimze PHP pages just like you would HTML pages. That's because only HTML is displayed to visitors, the PHP is processed on the server. You just want to make sure that your PHP scripts are generating the optimized HTML.

[Ghaleon]

Thanks, that's a relief.

I heard that the search engines have trouble parsing the site if you have more than three variables on your url code. I ussually have one, or maybe two on a few instances, so I should be alright.