PHP webpage optimization

[stevex33]

Hi,
This question is kinda hard to explain, so please bear with me.

For a new site of mine www.makeagreatsite.com I've been using php to make the layout easy to update, should I ever want to change anything.

For example, if you go to the home page, you'll see the top of the page which is the header.html file, a blue sidebar, which is the menu.html file and the index.htm file, which contains the actual content of the page.

On each page the menu and header files will be loaded around whatever content page I want it to.

I know that this might be very obvious to most people, but I want to explain everything full incase I miss something important :)

Take a look at the source code.

My question is this:
At the top of the source code is a title a head and body section, but further down the page, this appears again.

I'm guessing that the first part is for the php page itself, and the second set of head,body and title tags etc are for the content page.

Should I delete one of the sets of tags? Because it might look spammy if I have 2 titles for 1 page as well as descriptions and sets of keywords.

What shoudl I change if anything, or would it have no effect if I had 2 of everything, I assmue it would.

Thanks

[WomenXtra]

usually use one set of tags.. I never heard of anyone using 2. I follow the same steps you did with the header and footer + the menu. each has a file of their own, so i could update the site more easily. and the site is showing on the web and has been indexed.

[stevex33]

Oh another londoner, small world :)

I'm wondering why there are only 2 sets of tages though. Since it's pulling information from 3 pages, you'd think that there would be at least 3 sets of tags, i.e. 1 for the header, 1 for the menu and 1 for the main body of the content, hmmmm.

I think perhaps I should delete all the tags in the content one and use them in the php file, because this is the actual file that the search engines see.

I blocked search engines from finding the actual content of the pages i.e. the htm files that contain the information, but let them find the php pages as they contain the same information the content pages do.

I did this to avoid a content duplication penalty, was I correct in doing this?

[cyanide]

Yes, you should remove those extra tags from the header and menu files.

You shouldn't have to block those included files, since no one will find them, as they get compiled into the content page.

[stevex33]

I'm not worried about people finding them im worried about google finding them.

because the content in the php files and the actual content .htm files are the same, i don't really want google scanning my directories to find i've duplicated every page lol.

[cyanide]

I understood what you meant.

What I usually do, is put these pages in an includes folder, then block the folder from all search engines using htaccess