Search engine optimization on 68 classifieds

I have been wanting to make a post like this for a long time.


THE ULTIMATE FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ON 68 CLASSIFIEDS


It is a reality that many classified sites due to their nature and subject area, depend upon good rankings with search engines. They depend upon the traffic offered by those search engines and it forms part of the owners marketing plan.

Finally, we have developed a great way to perform complete onsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for 68 classified sites. It is quite a complex process to explain and technicalities exist in the detail. However, we have now made it straightforward to implement for the classifieds site owner, requiring a minimal amount of personal coaching and instruction.

We have arrived at our solution through developing a successful site and have now applied it to our TemplateCodes system as an add-on service (I will give a demo of it in a minute).

It is not just a 'plug and play' solution but one which requires a little consulting. Explanation is required to make best use of the system modifications . Perhaps an hour of one-to-one assistance is required as to why the code is structured in such a way and what are the choices to be made and strategies to deploy. Every site is going to have that 5-10% difference in terms of implementation though the rules of SEO do not change.

Here is a brief summary of what is involved at the technical level although the site owner will be only required to edit one or two files with their specific site details.

1. We solve the problem of dynamically creating page titles, meta descriptions and keywords for all relevant pages whilst excluding search engines from indexing irrelevant pages or those of little value. This requires a mix of a sensible robots.txt file and relevant assignments being used in the code to create the appropriate titles and meta tags.

2. The link structure structure needs to be created so that search engines discover your pages in a logical manner (i.e. hierarchically by their relevance). To exaggerate, presenting an individual advert to be indexed before a category is unlikely to best serve your goal.

3. To dynamically assign and make use of good "alt tags" for images and have "title tags" assigned to internal links that require them. Further, to assign default values if none exist.

4. To overcome the duplication issue that most dynamic sites suffer from. For example, where an finite number of urls can be generated in the browser with identical meta content and page content for that matter.

5. A good but simple .htaccess file can avoid canonical urls being created for search engines.

6.There are many situations where searches return no search results. This also creates a duplicate content scenario. This can be minimized through randomization of content in the correct place. It also occurs on expired listings which are all identical.

7. Sorting may be functionally useful to have in showlistings but it is highly likely to create duplicate content which is not good practice in terms of SEO. Best to prevent pages when sorted being indexed.

8. Pagination on showlistings is great for category, top, new and featured listings but poses a dilemma. Especially as it is best to suppress search results from being indexed (i.e. they use the same template). Its a bit of fine tuning but it is better to test for search and category listings and direct the search engine accordingly in terms of internal links.

9. Content is king and it is a good practice to encourage advertisers to place as much content into their adverts as is reasonable. More importantly, create high quality extra pages where you have full control and give them some precedence.

10. Off site SEO is very important and perhaps more so in terms of the end goal. There are a number of techniques and strategies which can be employed to get the right type of links to your site. Bad links and even good links to duplicate content will damage your search rankings.

So here is a demo site which has been optimized. It is based on our new Signma Series templates. There is some quite clever stuff included such as descriptions on categories being displayed in the home page but not on the main browse page but then displaying descriptions on lower level browse pages (i.e avoiding content duplication):

Property In France

Actually, it is a real site about to be put to work in the next few days. It is based upon a much older site (4.0.9) where this SEO system and process was first carried out in an ad hoc manner.

French Property For Sale - Buy A Property In France


To be frank, if anyone is interested in performing Search Engine Optimization on their site then do contact us. In advance, we must state that it is not a cheap process, costing a few hundred dollars and not tens of dollars. We can only take on a few customers at a time wishing to undertake search engine optimization of their 68C system. Customers must also be using a fairly up to date version of our TemplateCodes system too - Evo, Neo or Sigma series. The system can be implemented with both the 68C designer and developer versions. It requires no core file changes.