MS FrontPage

[postUre]

Can websites created and managed with Microsoft Frontpage be effectively optimized for search engines?

[mlevenhagen]

Yes. Why do you think they couldn't be?

You have complete control... the code might be a mess if you rely on the WYSIWYG, but you can clean that up easily enough... OK, well not easily enough, but you can:)... or hand code.

Optimization has everything to do with a lot of things... The only thing Front Page controls is your code... But then you can manage that as well...

[Corey Bryant]

FP will allow you to create your ALT tags, your meta tags, etc. These days, you need to know at least HTML to help you with any WYSIWYG editor. You also might check out Search Engines and Marketing for FrontPage

[postUre]

I have been hand coding my site for the past year. I am about to acquire a new template and have the choice of getting it in HTML or Frontpage format. I own Frontpage 2000 but have never used it. I am somewhat aware of what it takes to SEO a site as I have been studying this for a few months now. I have read that Frontpage adds excess code, or that the extensions can cause problems for crawlers. My site is about 60 pages so I thought Frontpage could help me make global changes easier and also help keep things organized better. Many times when I have made changes to my site I have had to do it page by page which is tedious. I would like to try to avoid that in the future but don't want to do that at the expense of SEO.

[Corey Bryant]

FP 2000 is a little old honestly. It does not handle ASP coding all that well and will not handle .NET at all.

There is a lot of bloated code in FP 2000 than in FP 2003.

If you have been hand coding for the past year - no reason really to "revert" to a WYSIWYG editor. Stick to hand-coding and get it in HTML. (You can always create the template for FP as well.)

[cyanide]

You might want to look into SSI (server side includes)
or php includes.
It will accomplish some of the global changes you are looking for

[postUre]

Can I add PHP and SSI Includes to an HTML site that uses cascading style sheets ? Do they cause any SEO problems,, or problems for crawlers?

[Corey Bryant]

You should name the extension either PHP or SHTML to have the server parse the file correctly.

[Faglork]

Originally Posted by postUre

Can I add PHP and SSI Includes to an HTML site that uses cascading style sheets ?

Of course. No difference.

Originally Posted by postUre

Do they cause any SEO problems,, or problems for crawlers?

Some crawlers do not crawl pages which are called with parameters. So if you use constructions like
http://www.domain.com/index.shtml?introduction
or
http://www.domain.com/index.php?query=introduction
some spiders recognize by the "?" that this is a dynamically generated page and may not spider it. Googlebot will sometimes spider such pages, for the others I don't know how they currently handle this.

You can circumvent that with rewriting, how, depends on whether you are on an apache or IIS server.

BTW: If you are on IIS, forget SSI. IIS supports only a fraction of SSI. In this case, use PHP.

PHP may be the better solution anyway, since you simply have more options - you can add any code you want. Want a dynamically created menue? No sweat. etc. etc.

Most of my sites rely heavily on SSI/PHP/CGI and sometimes use extensive URL rewriting. I have not noticed any problems with crawlers so far.

Only problem could be caching, but that's another story ...

Alex