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Search engines and your e107 theme

...search engine optimization for the e107 cms ...

So you are starting to build a new site using the user und search engine friendly cms e107?

Fine, have you already chosed your theme, have you hired a theme designer?

STOP!

You might have already made the biggest mistake for your success with search engines like Google.

Even if I always tell you that content is king, there are some points to be considered before choosing your e107 theme for your new site. You can correct this mistake later, but every change if it is not only changing your css WILL drop your positions for some time.

This infact is not limited to e107 driven sites, but we want good positions fast, dont we?

So if you have already choosen a theme, open up your site, stop guy, I dont told you to do it in your nice colourful IE or firefox window, you are smartass and use safari? Worse also, open up your site in LYNX, now you see your site almost like a bot wiil do. Fuck, where is all your fine content, it is there, scroll down, a there it is.

What happend? The developer of your high class e107 theme is a smart guy! He did everything to make it look nice, he used lot of .js to make it even smarter. He validated it to be valid XHTML and CSS. It is infact. But to get all this nice effects he was in need to overdo. Lots of information goes top, styles, menus etc.

Then when everything is out to the browser the content follows, in good e107 manner head first, but is there everything in the head that should come first, like the menus that actually link to content? I am in doubt!

Novadays designers tent to do everything in css, thats fine if you keep in mind how a page is delivered to the browser, which doesnt mean the individual that is sitting in front of it.

A typical e107 page consist of 3 elements, the header, content, the footer, unfortunally menu areas are rendered to the header or footer, no problem if you keep in mind what should come first.

So if you look at your theme.php the will be something like { MENU=1 } somewhere in the header, { MENU=2 }in the footer section. Fine, if you decide to put your search engine relevant content to your menu1. Do you? I dont think so, you put there the Userlogin, the chatbox if your login is done by the theme, the next fault if not dome properly, this definitely have to be one of the last parts that is send to the browser.

So please think twice before you decide which theme to use, which theme developer to choose, HE else decides if you get that top position in search engines. No later attempt at seo friendly urls will let you make this optimization fault undone!

This is the first of some short articles on search engine optimization for the e107 cms, other will follow.

e107 cms seo search engine optimization theme e107 themes