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| What Makes iAuto, iRealty and iLister SEO-Friendly? |
By
Tom Lander |
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This article describes specific SEO features of the WorksForWeb classifieds software family of products. These functions can be used to optimize your classifieds site for search engines and get better ranking.
Make your ads indexed via Browsing
Since all the above scripts are used to create classifieds web sites, it’s important to have all listings indexed by search engine crawlers. Search engines can not submit search forms and view search results and individual listings, as opposed to human visitors. Therefore, there has to be a way to crawl every listing via a number of links pointing directly to it. The best way to achieve that is through the Browsing functionality.
In all three software products of ours you can make your listing browseable by any field. By default, in iRealty, all listings are browsed by State, in iAuto, by Make/Model or body style, and in iLister, by category. You can change the browsing parameters to fit you particular needs, for instance, allow browsing by City or listing type.
Here is a brief example of how browsing works from the crawlers’ point of view:
Home page
-> All Listings in Alabama
-> Listing # 164
In the above example, all three pages will be indexed by the crawler. First, the home page, then the page with listings in Alabama, and finally, a listing details page of Listing # 164.
Customizing Keyword-Rich Listing URLs
It’s also important to have listings information/keywords in the URLs of the listing details pages. The reason is because search engines use URL text to determine content’s relevance. In all three scripts, you can construct a custom listing URL by adding any listing field values.
Moreover, some search engines just don’t index pages with query strings, or, simply put, with stuff following the question mark at the end of URL (see http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls).
This relates to URLs like www.your_site/display_listing.php?listing_id=424. (our former URL look)
E.g., by default, listing details URL in iAuto v.4.x looks like this:
http://www.iautosoftware.com/demo/listing_details/424/2005_Volvo_V70.html
As you can see, all data pertaining to car’s year, make and model are included into the URL.
In iRealty v.4.x, a default URL is:
http://www.irealtysoft.com/demo/listing_details/24/222_Pappan_Dr_Imperial_Pennsylvania.html
In this case, URL includes property address info.
And in iLister 4.x, it’s:
http://www.ilistersoft.com/demo/listings/3/Huge-Antique-Solid-Oak-Wall-Entertainment-Storage-Unit.html
Ad title, entered by user, is included into the URL.
Displaying Listing Parameters in Title, Description and Keywords Tags
SEO friendly classifieds site should have listing keyword phrases in the title, description and keywords meta tags of the listing page (see http://www.geocities.com/frakilk/seo-title-tag.html ).
In iAuto, iRealty and iLister, you can include any listing parameters into these tags easily. In case of iLister, a listing title entered by user is displayed in the page title, description and keyword tags. For iRealty, a property address can be displayed in META tags along with the city and state, and in iAuto, vehicle’s year of manufacture, make and model are shown.
You can easily modify these META tags in the listing details page template. Here is an example of how these tags are set in templates:
{title} {$listing.Year} {$listing.MakeModel.Make} {$listing.MakeModel.Model}{/title}
{keywords} {$listing.Year} {$listing.MakeModel.Make} {$listing.MakeModel.Model}{/keywords}
{description} {$listing.Year} {$listing.MakeModel.Make} {$listing.MakeModel.Model}{/description}
To summarize the above, by properly using these features in optimizing your classifieds site, you can get your ad pages to index fast and appear in the search engine results on top positions. All you have to do is to configure it once, and just let your users to do the rest of job by filling out the content.
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