Question about seo

1.

i am optimizing a website by implementing techniques such as title, meta tags, header tags, bold tags etc... by doing so am i optimizing the website for all the major search engines google, yahoo, msn, ask or do i need to optimize separately for these 4 search engines except for uploading a sitemap file which is an xml version to these 4 search engines.

2.

the web developers who have built the website have used php language and their website consists of a flash file which they want it to display as the header and the footer consists of links and the text at the center of the page changes depending on the links clicked on the footer. so there are 3 files included in index.php which are
header.php links.php and footer.php

each time a link is clicked from the footer the url is
http://website.com/index.php?page=webdevelopment or http://website.com/index.php?page=software etc...

so a query string is being passed and the relavant page content appears so basically there is only 1 page index.php for the entire website no matter which link is clicked on. i have managed to display a different title, different meta keywords and description tags each time a different link is clicked on from the footer section.

ideally in order to optimize a website there should be separate files ex= webdevelopment.php software.php about.php etc... and each page will load newly and the content will be displayed. this way while link building there will be different links available. in my case though there are individual files like webdevelopment.php software.php etc... because the company does not want to load the flash file again and again they have choosed to use include() php function due to which the url for the website is either
http://website.com or
http://website.com/index.php?page=webdevelopment or
http://website.com/index.php?page=software etc...

also the size of the flash file is not very big and the width and height are also not all that big however the company wants to load the flash file only once and the rest of the time only the text in the center keeps changing.

also i am able to optimize the content based on which link has been clicked and which appears at the center of the page, its only about the website having just 1 url

one alternative is to load each page individually so that there will be more than 1 link for the website and this will be useful for link building purpose.

can anyone please suggest as to what would be the best alternative for the situation of the website i am working on which uses include() and thereby ending up with only 1 url which might not be ideal from a SEO perspective. please advice the pros and cons for a given alternative so that i can decide which method to adopt for the website.

any help will be greatly appreciated.

thanks.

Hi sudhakararaog
1. Yes that is fine for all of them.

2. TBH you have hit the nail on the head in the search engines eyes you only have 2 pages.
yoursite/
yoursite/index.php

You should create sperate pages.

Now to load the flash file you can look at advanced caching technquies where the file is permantly cached. That way it is only loaded once, that being from the cache and not from the server.

However everytime the file is changed then you would have to change the file name so that it is re-cached in visitors browsers otherwise they will just end up viewing the old file regardless.

If the file is small though it shouldn't take long to load any way. If it does they should look into streaming it. This is where the flash file loads the first section an then plays it and while it is doing this it continues to load the rest of the file.

If you don't stream it then all the SWF file is downloaded at once before it plays this therefore creates a lag time before it is shown to your visitor.

Alternativly they could create a non-flash version and block the flash version from being indexed. This would get all the pages indexed.

Jaz

For Q2.
By using .htaccess you can remove the example.com and example.com/index.html problem.
Try out this bit of code in a .htaccess file (obviously changing the website name to suit your own).

Good point mattaseymour.
However you have a few typo's

1. There does not need to be a space between turning the rewrite engnie on this just adds weight to the .htaccess file, but it will still work with it.

2.
This line -

Should be -

The end of line symbol is not needed and you accidentally missed out the second escape on the the second period.

But for it to work it needs to be a negative rule.
So if the host is not...... redirect it to......
So to make it negative you have to add the negation (!).

This is not essential but I would add the no case flag ([NC]) on the condition, that way if
Matthewseymour.co.uk was typed in it would be redirected to -
matthewseymour.co.uk

Then on this line ou need to match the beggining of the string and the end of the string to move it over. It's probably not needed but it's how I've always seen it and is how I have always been tought to write it.

But you are right this will help.

Jaz

Thanks for the update, wront it all from memory. Obviously its not at good

Cheers for the update though

Hay it's alright buddy.
Have you ever read one of my posts?

You normally need a degree to work it out.

Jaz