Optimisation SEO: Philosophy Physics Metaphysics Forum

[haselhurst]

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Metaphysics Philosophy Physics Forum

This is a short introduction to Search Engine Optimization that should be useful for those interested in helping build a Philosophy Physics Metaphysics Forum that actually gets seen on the Internet (and in time actually has some success).

This forum allows you to use both HTML code and phpBB code. The following is written based on HTML coding. For more information of phpBB code see;
http://www.physics-philosophy-metaphysics.com/forum/faq.php?mode=bbcode

It is pretty obvious that when you build pages for the Internet you have two main constraints;
i) They must rank well in Search Engines (else they don't get seen).
ii) They must read well so people like / relate to the pages / knowledge.

And it seems to me that if you make the effort to write interesting things, (part of the aim of this forum on metaphysics, physics, philosophy) you may as well make that little bit more effort to optimise your posts / pages so they come up in search results and actually get seen / read.

In this post I am going to use these 4 terms 'forum, philosophy, metaphysics, physics' as the main keywords (as an example) so you can see that the first obvious thing is to try and get these keywords into title, heading, and text of first page (and making them bold probably helps a little bit - but Google particularly likes keywords that are in links).

Some general information.

1. Factors affecting Google Page Rank and Position in Search Engine results

For any page there are two main factors that determine Position in Google Search Results:
Content of Page - Internal; and
Links to Page - External (determines Google Page Rank).
My guesstimate is they equally contribute to final position in Search Engine Rankings.
These can then each be subdivided into two further parts, as follows;

Content / Internal Factors - 50% of Ranking

i) Title / Subject of Page - 25% of ranking
ii) Content of Main Page - Mainly Heading and first page content (link text is also important) - 25% of ranking

Links / External Factors - 50% of Ranking

i) Total Links to Page, - determines Google Page Rank - 25% of ranking
ii) Subject Specific Links to Page - related to actual Search Term - 25% of ranking.

2. Examples of Good Content / Internal Factors

The following is from my website and was not written for Forums (where there are more limitations on what you can do). However it is still probably useful to be aware of. I will use the same keywords (Philosophy Forum Physics Metaphysics) as an example.

When creating a new page, there are ten main areas where this keyword should be used.

i) HTML Page Name - e.g. http://www.physics-philosophy-metaphysics.com/forum/index.php

(Note use of lower case letters and hyphen. This phpBB Forum does not allow you to name further pages and automatically assigns them with numbers.)

ii) Title / Subject - e.g. Forum: Philosophy of Physics / Metaphysics

iii) Page Heading - e.g.

Philosophy Forum on Physics / Metaphysics of Space

(Normally you would use h1 html code. In this forum it seems that only h3 code works and so we also set font size to 'Huge' and add a font color). E.g.
Philosophy of Physics Forum: Metaphysics of Space

But really you can just make headings in this Forum using 'Color' and 'Huge Font Size' options.

iv) Sub Heading - e.g.

Forum discussing subjects of philosophy, truth, physics, reality & metaphysics from the foundation of One thing existing, Space, with Properties of a Wave Medium for Spherical Standing Waves that form Matter.

(In this Forum I use h4 html code and add color and Large font size.)

v) Page Text - Try to use keywords e.g. "Philosophy Physics Metaphysics Forum" about 5 times in first page of Text. Try to also break it up so different keywords are also used separately. e.g. This is a philosophy forum that also studies the subjects of Physics and Metaphysics. (Google will penalise pages if keywords are repeated too many times in exactly the same order - which explains why I have re-arranged order of these keywords in above examples!)

vi) Images - Name images "philosophy-physics-metaphysics-forum.jpg" or some combination of some of these keywords (gif's are OK too). In fact i would not normally make the image name so long with all keywords in it (this is just an extreme example). Instead it would be much better to use four different images and use each keyword once in each image name.

Most of our images are 80 pixels by 80 pixels, and we use Photoshop to 'save them for web' at about 2 Kilo Bytes (i.e. try to avoid using large images that make pages slow to download). In this forum you cannot upload images to server - but we have lots of lovely images on our http://www.spaceandmotion.com website that you can use by linking to them (see below).

vii) Images Alt Text - If you use html code (rather than phpBB code - and this forum allows both types of code) then images have an option to add 'Alt Image Text' (Alt being short for Alternative!). This nice image is a sample of a keyword optimised html image code (I renamed an image of Karene).




The above html image code looks like this;

_img src="http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Images/forum-metaphysics-philosophy-physics.jpg" align="left" alt="Karene Howie. Student of philosophy, administrator of Forum discussing subjects of truth, reality, philosophy, physics, metaphysics from the foundation of One thing existing, Space, with Properties of a Wave Medium for Spherical Standing Waves that form Matter."_

note: I had to remove <,> brackets from each end of code and replace them with _ so I can display it here.

viii) Link Text - If you add a link to a page it is very important to use the keywords in the actual link. Because we name our pages using correct keywords then you can normally just use the http address. For our philosophy physics metaphysics forum page the link / http address is;
http://www.physics-philosophy-metaphysics.com/forum/index.php

However you can also make links using html code, e.g. the above link could be made as follows;
Physics Philosophy Metaphysics Forum

Where the html code looks like this (note: I had to remove <,> brackets from each end of code and replace them with _ so I can display it here).

_a href="http://www.physics-philosophy-metaphysics.com/forum/index.php" target="_blank" title="By describing Reality in terms of One thing existing, Space, with Properties of a Continuous Infinite Eternal Wave Medium, the Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) explains and solves many of the fundamental problems of Physics Philosophy & Metaphysics.">Physics Philosophy Metaphysics Forum</a_

ix) Link Title Text - You will notice when you mouse over the above physics philosophy metaphysics link you get a small window appearing with the 'Title' text (similar to Image Alt Text). It is useful to add this title text which helps Google (and people) to more accurately determine the page content that the link points to. Try to get keywords in title text once or twice.
This mainly applies when you are building links pointing back to the page that you are trying to get higher ranking for (Google calls them Backward Links).

Examples of Good Links / External Factors
Basically the last two points on Link text are the most critical. i.e. That the links that point to the relevant page include keywords for that page, both in the link text and in the link title text.

The two other obvious factors which greatly influences the value of external / backward links are;

i) The Page Rank of the page the link is on - higher is obviously better - PR 4 are OK, PR 5 are good, PR 6 (and above) are excellent.
ii) The number of external Links on that page (the lower the better.)

So if you can find a page rank 6 page with only a few external links and can add a keyword optimised link to one of our pages then we would think you are a complete legend! In reality, most pages that you can add links to average around PR 4 and might have 20 other external links on them - however, if the links are keyword optimised to the page they link to then they are very useful, particularly if a group of people can do this on 50 to 100 of these pages over a year (and much more benefit is gained if pages with links are from different websites!).

Also it is much better in this Forum to have lots of small pages rather than fewer large pages. So try to keep creating new posts rather than replying to existing posts (while being a bit sensible about this so content can be understood - it is often useful to copy relevant part of post, then create new post and past in text and use 'quote' option).

To find the keywords that people actually search (very important) see;
(http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/)
(Copy and past URL into browser. Digital Point have a great website - I have just joined their forum)

For more information on Search Engine Optimization, Web Tools & useful Websites on Internet see;

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/how-to-help-the-wave-structure-of-matter.htm

Hope this helps a bit.
Geoff Haselhurst

NOTE: This post is "LOCKED". To respond just post a New Topic.