Search Engine Optimization - Best Practices?

[kholtman]

I'm trying to decide if I need to use SEO, and if so, what's the best way to go about using it.

Here's some questions:

1) Do I really need to turn this on to get my site's categories/articles into Google? That is, if I don't turn on SEO, will the information get into GOOG's index at their next crawl, or do I have to do something extra to make sure the spider crawls into each article.

2) How do I set up links. I added a bunch of articles which reference other articles, and for some I put the in href using the non-SEO url (has the showentry.php?e=34 type syntax), and for others I used the SEO style (category-12/entry-34). I've noticed two problems with this approach:

2a) If I turn off SEO, I can't edit articles reached via a SEO-style tag.

2b) If I had images in the article, using a ../images style path, they get broken when I switch back and forth between the SEO settings. I understand why that is (.. means "up one", and the URLs have different levels of "directories" in them depending on what SEO option is set.)



So,

1) do I really need SEO?

2) If so, should I always use full path specifiers for images?

3) If I'm linking between articles, should I use the SEO or the non-SEO format?


What do other people do?


Thanks for any input.

Kim.

[Brian]

1). That does not have to be turned on to get a page indexed. Most believe that it helps to get the pages ranked higher and possibly quicker though since search engines may recognize static HTML files better than a PHP file with query strings. It also adds the title of the category and entry within the URL, so it helps some with having those keywords. Nobody really knows exactly how much those things help, and different search engines are going to have different algorithms but most agree that it does help.

2). If you're undecided about your SEO settings, linking to 'showentry.php?e=34' will probably be best. When the SEO options are enabled anyone going to that URL will automatically be redirected to the SEO friendly one.
As for the images, it may be better to use full URL's. A <base> tag pointing to your dynamics root folder is added when SEO URL's are enabled, but it is not added (no need for it) when SEO URL's are disabled. That's also what breaks the "Edit" link when viewing an entry from an old SEO link. I should be able to include something in the next release to make sure you're redirected from the SEO friendly URL to the normal URL in cases like that to prevent that issue as well.

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[kholtman]

Thanks, Brian!