So you are a web developer and the search engines just aren’t picking up your deep links. Maybe your links aren’t that deep but you want to provide more memorable URLs. Either way the solution lines in .htaccess file and mod_rewrite. Once I tried to do URL reformatting within PHP and not only was it ugly and hacky, it really didn’t work. Plus http://fiebert.com/index.php/experience just doesn’t look as sweet as http://fiebert.com/portfolio/experience.

This whole revamping of your URL structure is actually fairly easy. The first step is creating a file “.htaccess” in your root folder. From there we just decide exactly how you want to structure your URLs. This is the first part of my file:

Now to start replacing URLs like http://fiebert.com/college.php?project=perl with http://fiebert.com/portfolio/college/perl gets a little more complex. The htaccess file uses some basic regular expression (regexp) syntax, this is from the htaccess docs

Text:
.           Any single character
[chars]     Character class: One  of chars
[^chars]    Character class: None of chars
text1|text2 Alternative: text1 or text2 (ie. "or")

Quantifiers:
?           0 or 1 of the preceding text
*           0 or N of the preceding text	(hungry)
+           1 or N of the preceding text

Grouping:
(text)	Grouping of text
	(either to set the borders of an alternative or
	for making backreferences where the nth group can
	be used on the target of a RewriteRule with $n)

Anchors:
^           Start of line anchor
$           End   of line anchor

Escaping:
\char		escape that particular char
		(for instance to specify special characters.. ".[]()" etc.)

Keeping that in mind, below is how I replace http://fiebert.com/college.php?project=perl with http://fiebert.com/portfolio/college/perl

I’ve been working on an e-commerce site for a client and I really start thinking about the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PR (Google’s Page Rank); suddenly it dawns on me how easy it is to improve your rank. Now I know I’m probably the last web developer in the world to learn and implement SEO but just in case there is someone else out there who doesn’t know I will detail for you how to improve your rank.

For Google and its infinitely complex algorithm to rank your website, it really just boils down to two things, popularity and coding standards. A seasoned veteran who makes a living off of SEO alone may curse my ignorance but really just because someone can make a living off of one thing doesn’t mean its all that complex. Hell, I use to think flying a plane was complicated until I heard all the stories about 13 year old Flight Sim geeks hijacking airplanes and flying cross country.

To break down your websites “popularity”, all you need to do is look at who links to you. The more links you have, the more popular you are. However that isn’t the end of it, because if I go and buy 100 domain names and link them all to http://www.vfork.org or http://www.codedrink.com it wont necessarily raise their page rank. See at the time of writing this my blog’s page rank is 1, and in Google speak that means I’m very unpopular. How do you get the popular kids to link to you? Easy, post stupid comments all over the internet. For example, if you goto digg, any number of the top 10 stories will be blogs with a page rank of 8, create an account on them, make a post and be sure to fill out your profile with your web address. Give Google a week and you should have a pretty solid PR (vfork.org, my sandbox, has a PR of 4 after only one night of work).

The other factor is coding standards. Google uses internet tags and CSS structure to judge what content on your website is important. H1 tags are really important so throw some keywords in there and it will do wonders. Make sure you comply with HTML and CSS coding standards, broken code can hurt your rank. Also another note is look at your URL. If it looks like index.php?blargh=crap&foo=bar then chances are you aren’t getting the PR you deserve. Use mod_rewrite and change your link structure similar to this blog. Don’t know how to do it? Give me a day or so and I’ll write that up for you too.

Oh yea, First Post!