Forum Moderators: mack
I have quite a few questions for you guys but I'll try to break them into digestible bits.
OK, first, is it true that a WYSIWYG will create "dirty code" and mess up the potential of your website? I have 2 sites that I created but I'm not fluent in coding just yet so I did it the easy way.
Next, do you think that if I truly gave it my all to create a site full of useful content I can feel confident to start emailing webmasters and requesting links from them? I just finished the 3rd redesign of both of my sites because I wasn't happy with them. In my excitement, I rushed through and felt I was cheating any readers I may get out of the content they want. Now, I am satisfied with what I've done. One of my sites has like 30 pages of solid information. Is this enough to offer in exchange for high PR sites?
3rd, is it better for file names to have the individual words separated by - because they read as keywords by the search engines that way? I just heard this and went about changing my file names from alloneword file names.
OK, only 1 more question (for now). How do you cloak a link in such a way that it looks as though it's still part of your site? For example, www.mysite.com/recommends-whatever-I -recommend.html is what I want to show up, but the link is not on my site at all. I know this can be done because I did it with one of my affiliate links a long time ago. I forgot how I did it, duh.
I can't wait to pick your brains in here...muwahahahahaha.
Sheree
I'll take your first question. No, not any longer; WYSIWYG's have come a long way over the past few years. But...that comes with a very big caveat: It's usually a good idea to become familiar with any tool before using it. For example, with Frontpage (now Expressions Web) you can write perfectly valid HTML strict -- but you first have to tell it that's what you want to do by knowing how to set the authoring preferences.
There are trial versions of most WYSIWYG's. You might want to download a couple and give them a spin.
That's great news though, thanks.
Sheree
So I would say - just get something built. As you learn more, you can tweak or totally revamp your template. A good template is better than a bad template. But a website today with a bad template is probably better than a website six years from now with a great template.
This came up in a lot of the site review sessions at Pubcon. In the 4-5 review sessions I attended, the concensus seemed to be that it was a good idea as long as you didn't end up with filenames with lots of hyphens (5,6,7...) that appear to be spammy. I think even Matt Cutts stated this in the final review session on Thursday.
The folder names and filenames in the URL are secondary and carry little weight with the SEs in comparison to title tags, header tags (H1, H2), page content, and anchor text on incoming backlinks. That being said, they do carry 'some' weight. And they do allow you to give the engines yet another way to tell what the page is about (ie. list a keyword or two). The SEs see hyphens as a word separator. So I see it as a tool to create not only keyword rich URLs, but Keyword Phrase rich URLs.
We are in the midst of a site redesign and our new folder and file names will all be of the form my-page-name instead of mypagename for multiword phrases.
[edited by: ZydoSEO at 5:24 pm (utc) on Jan. 1, 2008]
As far as the wordpress thing goes, I don't really know what you're saying. I don't mean to seem dense or anything, but you lost me with the template explanation.
Sheree
There are many ways to achieve this from an implementation perspective, but the essence is this: every link gets in some way redirected to the URL that you want.
You could do this with mod_rewrite redirects on Apache (google on mod_rewrite for info on what that is). That has several drawbacks in terms of maintenance and function.
You can also do it with a simple redirect script.
So instead of
mysite.com/recommends-whatever-I-recommend.html
as you have it, it would be
mysite.com/recommends/whatever-I-recommend.html
Then the 'recommends' script looks up 'whatever-I-recommend' in some sort of table (database, array within the script itself, a CSV file saved from an Excel spreadsheet) and records any data you want, and then sends the user on.
That's the theory. You would use some language like PHP, PERL, ASP or whatever you have running on your server to do this and you would have to know some simple coding (someone posted a simple "link cloaking" script here not so long ago, but you can likely find many by searching on 'link cloaking script').
