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Best SEO tips for custom made php sites
May 12 2015 at 02:31am
Greetings reader, am sharing with you today tips/guide that can help with SEO(search engine optimization) for your custom made php site/project.
First, what is SEO?
SEO which is Search Engine Optimization in full involves all practices (wholesome ones only) which can help make your site visible on Google search result and other search engines.
Why do I need SEO? (why is it so important)
I will answer this question with a story. I will try to keep it short and interesting. When I restarted projectnaija.com (PN) in 2014 getting some traffic to the site was very difficult I shared links on various social networks every time but turn up was still very poor. I didn't have many people helping with the promotion(sharing of links) of PN then something came to my mind. How do I appear on first page of Google search results? I Googled out a few tips on it and pn moved from page 2 to the first result on page one when you search for "projectnaija" or "project naija" this gave me great joy because the keyword "projectnaija" was heavily dominate with results that are not related to my site. My SEO didn't just stop at getting PN to top page for that keyword many of my contents are on first page too and these days I get a lot of traffic from search engines.
What I have learnt over the past 1.5 year am going to be sharing here. I will list the first 5 moves to take:
1. Use clean URL (rewrite url on your site)
as a php developer I was able to rewrite my url using some htaccess tricks these helped a lot and was my first move on SEO of projectnaija.com
2. Sign up for Google webmasters tool and submit your site url there
Use webmasters tool to manually crawl your site if your website is really need (my opinion Google doesn't crawl new sites often you will need to force them to crawl from webmasters tool)
3. Have a niche (your site should be about something)
Custom made php sites too should have a niche/area of specialization. For example if you site is a forum that talks movie focus on movies and you will gradually make your way to first page for searching related to movies same applies to which ever niche you choose for your site.
4. Post original contents and promote them
One good thing to do is to avoid copy and paste contents write things in your own words and also write on things you feel people need but are rarely available on the web.
5. Time heals all wound (poor SEO too)
It will take a bit of time even after applying these methods but as you wait keep sharing links to your articles on social media/forums. Please sharing of links is not the same as spamming. Do not spam.
Well, I will pause here for now but these are my first seo moves which showed great improvements in my first 3 months with PN. Good luck... comments and questions are welcome
