Location, Location, Location

[Maffo +]

Well I have recieved yet another mail asking me about setting up locations as parent categories.

Many people have set up their sites in this way and my point of view is that it is simply wrong.

Some members of this board promote this type of set up but for me it is totally inefficient. This is my all round solution to Locations, Searches & SEO

A category is a category.

A location is a location.

Keep the two completely seperate.

If you have 50 states and 50 categories, how many categories do you need to setup? maintain? alter?

2500? When it should be 50 or 100 tops.

I have a location system in my store which takes full control of your locations. You create the default states, towns/cities in the admin. The user upon registering has an ajax drilldown from country down to town with the defaults you have defined. Should you have missed a town, the user clicks 'none of these' which turns the dropdown into a text area.

The user submits his town and it goes into the db but awaiting approval. You can decide whether to add the town, or place the user in a different location.

For a start, this method means you dont have 4 users registering from new york.

1 is from New York
1 is from NYC
1 is from NY
1 is from New York City

Now with the current system, you would have in your db, 4 locations for the same 1??? This will affect searches etc.

So firstly control your locations!!!

Once you have a nice, neat & tidy location system, you have the power to utilize the locations.

I have built a search mod plugin which allows you to add the advanced search to all pages.

This consists of ajax categories and ajax locations. The two work 'independently'.

The ajax location works like the user registration where it loads the countries, upon selecting a country, a dropdown of child states appear, upon selection a dropdown of child towns appear.

You can decide in the admin whether the locations populated in the dropdown menus are....

a: All locations in your db
b: Locations from registered users
c: Locations from registered users who have posted ads.

I think C is the best otherwise the user will search empty locations.

What the admin also allows you to do is make the location a $_SESSION variable which means the location is stored in memory. In the admin you select which pages will hold the location and when it should be dropped. EG, logout.php should reset the session.

With the location stored in the memory you can have an unbelievable platform to work on. You can basically localise anything on your site!!

Locations totally solved yes?

The search categories part has two options which you select in admin.

a: The cats work as a drilldown from parent to infinite children. Upon selecting a parent a new dropdown of children is displayed. This is ideal for those with lots of sub-cats, sub-sub-cats, sub-sub-sub-cats etc

b: The cats appear in the standard 68 list but the extra fields appear dynamically. This is for those who use lots of extra fields.

Once again, the search string is stored in the memory and will only reset on the pages you say so in the admin. This means a user can search, his search results are displayed and also his old search has repopulated in the correct fields in your searchform. The user can click on an ad, he can still see his search query and change it at any time. He can see 'more ads from this seller', contact owner, whatever you want. You might reset the search if the user goes back to your index.php. The decision is yours as the admin.

So well, thats pretty much locations and searching totally wrapped up. Well almost......

The Search Engines!

You have all these nice locations in your db so why not use them to their full potential?

The 'localisation plugin', which is just being finished, will allow you to manipulate locations. Different home pages maybe? Or the same text but with the $_SESSION location variable used. Page titles, descriptions, keywords, hover tags, h1s, h2s, etc all localised. Right throughout the page in every place available so you are definatley SEO'd for the location.

This will give you a huge bonus if some searches for "something on your site - location"

The news mod has been programmed to be used in this system. You can write an article and submit it only to the towns/states/countries that you deem fit.
All the while dragging you up the search engines.

1 more module which fits in with the SEO part is of course 'the product' or your categories on your site.

The new multisite module will allow you to set up infinite sites but you can set them up like categories.

Eg. Your site is boats,cars,bikes,horses.

At present, your page titles,descriptions, keywords, are....

Yoursite - The best place for boats,cars,bikes and horses

Whats a search engine going to think of that when its comparing data. If Im searching for a car, only lets say at best, 20% of the meta data and other elements, have anything to do with cars.

With the multi-site module you can set up cars as its own entity. Its own keywords, page title etc.

Your meta data could be

Yoursite - Cars - New & Used Cars for Sale

This system also allows for sub-sites so I could use Makes as my meta data.

Yoursite - Mercedes Benz Cars - New & Used Mercedes Benz Cars For Sale

I myself would drop the 'Yoursite' which is provides you no help on the Search Engines and takes up valuable title characters. Keep to around 60-70

As I also have a fabulous location $_SESSION variable I can add that to my title

New & Used Mercedes Benz Cars for sale - Tottenham London UK

All I want now is a dynamic sitemap which only creates pages and localised sites where I actually have content. No empty pages on the Search Engines.

Thanks for reading