New Site For Search Engine Project

**itgl72** · 03-16-2007, 04:02 PM

I'm getting into the Google game, and other search engines as well. Right now I have a company website I purchased. I like its look and feel and many of the features for drip email marketing, MLS, etc. But, theres no use in doing anything with it for SEO. What I have done for traffic thus far is PPC. That will do for now while I wait the months ahead for any search engine traffic.

What I have done is purchased a new domain name with some keywords in it and will be hosting it on a server I have access to. I have taken my purchased website, which is a TABLES layout, and completely recoded the template, to be a CSS design which I understand may be more search engine friendly. Right now if I put both templates side by side in my browser they look identical in IE7 and FF2.

My goal is to have different content on the CSS website but have links, like to the MLS search and other functions, going to my TABLES designed company website. This way a web visitor will not think they went to a different site because the same look and feel of my web presence with me maintained. There will also be links from the company tables design website to my SEO CSS website to places like my real estate articles section.

Do you think linking to my website with the MLS functionality will hurt me in anyway with the search engines? I'm pretty much going to have to do it this way regardless because I'm not willing to part with the company website I have been using because of the features on it I use.

I have not put this new domain and website on the server yet but have been working on content for it for several weeks. I have about 20 real estate related articles I have written on various topics. I'm not really a writer but with time I can pump out some decent reading :-)

Before I put this site online and submit it to the search engines I want to have as much as possible done, and have my ducks in a row if you will atleast to a point where it will not hinder me.

I have been reading this forum, and quite honestly I am overwhelmed with the information so reading and learning will take me a while, however for right now I have some questions.

I plan on using INCLUDES within the page for sections like my footer, links, side bars on the content pages, etc. This way if I need to make an edit I just edit the INCLUDE html page and all pages with that INCLUDE file will be updated. Do search engines that crawl a website read whats in the INCLUDE sections? Will using INCLUDE sections hinder me with search engines crawling? I *THINK* spiders will crawl a page the way we humans VIEW the page when surfing but I'm not sure.

Would it be a problem if at the end of every real estate related article I had a section with promotional content that also listed several cities and county names I work in? I would use an INCLUDE for this as well. Would the search engines be upset with me if they saw that same content at the bottom of every page? Obviously you know why I would want the city names there, they are my keywords!

I have read a lot about links and backlinks. I'm not sure I understand how to do that yet, but I have to crawl before I walk and actually get a website online first. Any info or resources on this would be helpful. If I get a link to come to my sites main address MYDOMAIN.com does the search engine system count the links for the entire domain or JUST that one page? How do you folks do it? Do you actually have links to your pages that are within your website? Or just the front page? I guess I really need to get a grasp on the linking side of things, and how its relevant to the whole process! :-)

I have the free version of webceo loaded and will try to use that as something to get going.

I'm just looking for a pointer on some things so I go in the right direction.
Thanks for any help, tips, or resources you can provide!

**itgl72** · 03-24-2007, 07:53 PM

Sorry for the bloated post - I should know better than to ask too much at once. I got kind of excited. Still, if anyone has anything they would like to add I'm all ears. I just want to get the beginning stages of the search engine process for this website as close to good as possible.

**itgl72** · 03-24-2007, 09:20 PM

Thanks Vamoosevarmint, thats a start for me!

**bmc** · 05-17-2007, 10:14 PM

You do want to have links pointing to both your main page and other content pages within the website. The links pointing to other pages within your website are called deep links. Deep links will help increase PR on the pages they link to within your website.

**HHI Golf Guy** · 05-18-2007, 08:10 AM

Includes are a server side function. When the bot gets to that section that content is already "on" the page. Ergo, SE's have no problem reading includes.

With Google, you need to be careful how much similar content you have on all of your pages. For example, let's say you have an extensive side bar menu and extensive footer section that is the same on all or most of your pages. Google has a fairly new filter (a boilerplate template filter) that could put your pages into the supplemental index. Adam Lasnik at Google briefly mentioned boilerplate template here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...e-content.html

To avoid having pages labeled as boilerplate templates, what you need to do is make sure that the majority of your page (code + content) is unique from page to page. You might have to combine some pages on your site to accomplish this.

What we do with some sites is have a basic horizontal menu, and then a vertical menu that changes depending upon where the user is on the web site (i.e. a segmented content menu). We also use multiple footers throughout most web sites.