SE Optimization

If you do not intend to submit your Classified Board site to Search Engines (SE), then you might want to skip this entire section at all. Otherwise read carefully and try to follow the guidelines for your site optimization and preparation for SE crawlers visit using built into Rapid Classified tools. There is no need to emphasize how important it is to have your site properly indexed by SE in order to get the highest rank possible and drive more traffic to your site. Although there are many different factors are in play when it comes to ranking, the site optimization is the first step in achieving just that.

robots.txt is a text file which you may place to the root of your web site. This file contains the name of pages and folders which you do NOT want for spider to crawl, index and present one way or another. The file must be properly formatted for the spider to understand it and must be located at the root of your website.

RC comes with a preset robots.txt file. The vast majority of classified board pages, scripts, and folders do not need to be indexed. There is no need for the spider to spend time going through those pages creating invalid and unnecessary indexes. If you place RC into some folder off the root, then you need to move robots.txt to the site root and in addition to modify path to RC pages and folders in robots.txt file (path to folders must start with "/"). For more information regarding robots.txt file format, building this file SE specific please go to http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm

 It's important to have a proper description and keywords meta tags configured within individual pages at your classified site. Different search engines crawl your site differently but most of SE would pay attention to the keywords and compare them to the actual text on your site for the match and relevancy and then would use this information while calculating the rank. There are way too many articles and materials on the internet to read about SE optimization and proper keywords selection. Therefore this manual would only describes the procedure for optimizations related to Rapid Classified site.

It would be easy to set meta tags when you have a static web site. The Rapid Classified for the most part however uses dynamically build page content such as categories/subcategories/ads list display. For instance viewscat.asp would have a different content for each category you have created. In addition all pages are set to use a common header.asp and consequently hard-coded (in header.asp) meta tags would result in the same keywords appearing on every page.

The meta tags optimization is constructed  by specifying a page title, description, keywords as well as a readable text for each category/subcategory/3rd-level category. In addition, the global meta properties can also be set at the site level. The best part of this system is that it's transparent and inheritable. This means the meta tags content would  automatically be passed to the lower level category if they are not specified at all for that lower category! In addition the keywords and description for ads view page are constructed from the subject of the ad itself.

Meta Tags and Title

Start by selecting description and keywords meta tags for your site. Open "Categories Administration" page. At the bottom of the page type or paste meta properties and save it by clicking "Set Meta Properties". All pages at this point would inherit this set of meta tags content. The Title of your site has already been set when you specified a "Site Name" during setup.

Next, set meta content and title at category level (right bellow option fields) and click "Modify".  Those tags should be set for each individual top level category you have created. The result of your top level category configuration would be individual keywords, title and description at viewscat.asp page. This page displays the list of the subcategories for each top level category. If you do not set meta properties for some category, the global site meta configuration content would be used instead (for title the "Site Name" from "Admin Preferences" will be used). Compare to global site properties, the category/subcategory uses extra "Full Description" and "Title" fields. The "Full Description" is a visible text which will appear at the top of the appropriate pages. It is recommended to have this filed completed for two reasons:

• SE will search your page for the text to evaluate the relevancy of meta keywords. So you might want to specify visible description for each category.

• You simply give users a bit more information regarding type of ads they can post under certain category.

Tip: Never cheat by masking text or blending it with the background! SEs are smart enough to recognize that and put your site in a "block out" list.

The process of filling meta tags content and title for Subcategories and 3-rd Level Categories is similar to the Top Categories. For subcategories the meta properties will appear on viewlist.asp page. This page is used to display the list of all ads under certain subcategory as well as the list of 3-rd Level categories under this subcategory. The meta properties under 3-rd level categories will appear on viewsublist.asp page. This page is used to display the list of all ads under specific 3-rd level category.

Transparency of a Meta tags and Title

There is a complex routine, which creates an inheritance and transparency for categories tree in relation to Meta Description and Keywords content tags as well as Site Title.

The transparency means that if you did not set a title for lower level category, it will automatically inherit a title and meta content from the category above it.

Example:

You set Category>Subcategory>3rd Level: Computers>Processors>Pentium

You then set the Title, Meta Description and Keywords for Computers main category. However the property fields for Processors and Pentium are not set (empty). When you navigate to the list of ads under Processors or Pentium (pages viewlist.asp and viewsublist.asp) there are 2 possible scenarios depending on "Default to Category" check box status (see "Global Site Description and Keywords Meta Tags" section at the bottom of "Category Administration" page):

• If "Default to Category" is Not checked: The list pages (for Processors or Pentium categories) will Inherit a Title and Meta description/keywords form  the Global Description/Keywords set at the bottom of "Category Administration" and the title from Site Name set at "Admin Preferences".

• If "Default to Category" is checked: The list pages (for Processors or Pentium categories) will Inherit a Title and Meta description/keywords from category Computers.

If  you set the property fields for Processors but not for the Pentium, then the Pentium 3rd Level category category will inherit a Title and Meta Description/Keyword from Processors Subcategory.

Important: The "Title" of your site is the most important header tag, which almost all SEs are paying an extra attention to. This is the field, which has checked while script routine evaluates and calculates the transparency. This means, if you set Meta Description/Keywords at Subcategory level but skipped the Title, no inheritance by 3-rd Level category from Subcategory will occur and depending on "Default to Category" check box, the given 3-rd Level category will inherit either the Main Category properties on the Global Settings.

Using the flexibility of Meta content and Title inheritance, you with a little effort can built a site properly optimized for SE.

Meta tags and Title for ads display pages

The meta content for viewad.asp and view_print.asp pages is build dynamically. Those pages are used to display individual ads in full and print friendly format. The title and meta description content are build using the subject of the ad. The meta keywords are build from the subject itself, plus each word from the subject which is greater than 2 letter in length, plus "buy, sell" words. You may add a common static keywords for all ads by modifying static_ads_keywords variable at the line 484 in libraries.asp page. Separate additional words by a coma.
In addition the category/subcategory names are also displayed in the page title.

Tip: Educate your clients how to write a proper ad subject. Create a section on your main page and send newsletters explaining, that for the effective ad indexing by SE, the subject must by right to the points, relate to the ad content and must contain effective keywords. Using exclamations, promotional language will not really help to gain more visitors to the ad - Correctly formatted Subject will!
 

Title and Meta Tags for custom static pages (Advanced ASP developers)

If you have created a custom page or wish to display some other Rapid Classified pages with specific Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords, you may modify a build-in function to do so.

• First make sure this page is not listed in robots.txt file.

• Then open libraries.asp page and find Sub buildMeta(). This is a subroutine which builds all Meta and Titles.

• Create a new Case in Select Case scr_Name statement like:
  
  Case "pagename.asp"
     result_meta_description = "Description for your page"
     result_meta_keywords = "Keywords for your page"
     result_web_name = "Title for your page"

• Save libraries.asp

Your new page will display properties you just set.

The last step in SE optimization is to decide whether or not to cache ads. Normally ads display dynamically through viewad.asp and view_print.asp pages. However while indexing, the search spider might not find all ads due to the fact that links to ads are build dynamically from... again dynamically created pages such as viewlist.asp and viewsublist.asp. Spider might not properly jump from one page to another if you have list pages spanned for the same subcategory (dynamic paging - more than one page to list ads). Some spiders will not go deep into levels and some will be confused at all. The most reliable way to have all your ads crawled, is to create a static cache pages for ads in .htm format and place them into separate folder. Four conditions must be met for a successful caching:

• You need to enable caching: go to "Admin Preferences", check "Enable Ads Caching" check box and save changes.

• You Web Server Must Suppost MSXML2 component (most do).

• The folder specified as ad_cache variable value in config/config.asp must have write/delete permissions set (by default this folder is "ads"). Unlike other write/delete folders (banners/db/cl_upload), this folder is not evaluated for permissions during setup because initially caching is turned off and not everyone would need this feature enabled.

• You have properly configured your "Site URL" in "Admin Preferences". Properly means, it is pointed to your classified location and ended with "/". Here are few examples:
  
  - mysite.com ---> wrong
  - www.mysite.com ---> wrong
  - http://www.mysite.com ---> wrong
  - http://www.mysite.com/ ---> right (RC is located at the root of the site)
  - http://www.mysite.com/classified/ ---> right (RC is located in "classified" folder from the root of the site)

Once you performed above tasks all posted ads will have a cache page created in "ads" folder and available for SE crawling. The page format is ad_numetic_id.htm. The cached ads are a duplicate of dynamic content page view_print.asp (ads print friendly format). The full ad view page (viewad.asp) is not used for caching for a number of reasons. One of them is your site space - each full view cache ad page would take twice as much space as print friendly cache page. This would also affect a bandwidth.

You may freely modify view_print.asp page. However, (and this is Important) when modifying this page make sure every hyperlink, image and script source has a complete URL started with "htt://".

To make your cached pages available for Search Engines to crawl, you must explicitly list links to all cashed pages. There is a page created specifically for this purpose. adslist.asp is the page which lists all cached ads. If you plan to use cached ads, you need to create a link to this page anywhere on your board (by default there is no link to this page). The most appropriate place is the bottom on the footer.asp where copyright information is listed. This page is not as much for your users as for the Search Engine Crawlers.  

A few notes on cached ads behavior:

• Ads are cached right after the posting regardless of the ad status. For the obvious reason ads will not appear in the Search Engine index right away. But by caching immediately, you might have your cached ads indexed by a spider on demand and you most likely approve it before it appears in the SE index.

• Cached ads are kept current. This means they are updated while someone edits the ad or modifies attached images.

• Cached ad is not removed when ad is expired or disabled. It will automatically be removed when you delete ad however. This makes sense - you want to keep your ads in the SE index as long as possible even if it's expired. There will be no need to create a new index if user repost the ad. And even if user will not repost, you will still have an extra link to your site. People who get to the expired cached ad while do search using SE will get a message that ad is expired, when they click on "Full detailed ad view". But the fact that you get another visitor is always a big plus because there is a chance that they will stay and continue browsing your site.

• If you enabled caching after some ads have already been posted, you may still cache previously posted individual ad by clicking "Cache" on view ad page. To cache/recreate All ads click "Cache All Ads" at "Admin Preferences". To delete All cached ads click on "Delete cached Ads". Important: While deleting cached ads ALL pages regardless of content will be removed from the cached ads folder.

• The average cached ad will be between 10-15 kb in size depending on the content.

• The dynamic meta keywords from ad subject will be passed to the cached ads.