Dolphin 7 SEO Needs A Little More Polishing

Zorro and here still testing and evaluating D7 as I am working on a future D6 to D7 migration project. I have ran a full time Internet business for nearly 10 years now and the one thing that I know for sure that is key for success is a site must has plenty of TRAFFIC.

You can have the best looking site in the world but if nobody finds you there is no value in the site other then to the maker of that site. Let me say this one more time TRAFFIC is KEY. 

Good SEO is one of the ways you can get good quality TRAFFIC. For those new to building a website SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Here are just a few initial things that I have found with D7 and I encourage others to jump in and contribute.

1. The Ajax stuff is all cool and means a lot when it comes to reducing page loads but just KILLS SEO. For example, You can go to the Dolphin D7 demo here http://boonex.us/browse.php and notice that there is two views for people. The default is Simple and the other is Extended. This looks cool from a member's perspective. But here is the problem. The switch between Simple and Extended does not allow a search bot like Google bot to pick up on that valuable spider bate like Country, City, ect for each member. Why because the switch to extended view is Ajax.Same is true for many other areas of Dolphin. Now I realize that there is also a balance between having to many links on a given page. But one must also think about how visitors are going to find your site and CONTENT is KING on the net. So every word counts:-)

2. Next the browse by Sex, Age, and Country lacks good SEO. As you drill down into each level notice that while the URL's are friendly and clean and relative to the subject of that level. However, also notice that the Titles for each page as you drill down just continues to say Browse Profiles and does not change bases on the level they are. This is very very BAD for SEO and should be changed.

There are many other areas that should be tweaked and way to much for me to list here today so that Dolphin can be all that it can be so its customers can success at whatever niche they are going after.

I am going to provide some basic FREE tools and references that I encourage Boonex and others to have a look at and there are many more out there.

1. http://www.seo-browser.com  Use this tool to see different areas of the site to see how a Bot looks at and views your site. Don't forget there is an advanced view link in the top right corner.

2. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

3. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Description  Xenu's Link Sleuth checks Web sites for broken link
4. http://www.dead-links.com LINK VALIDATION SPIDER

In conclusion,  I think that Boonex should tweak D7 a bit more for SEO as well as the possibilities of having a built in site map that provides natural crawl and navigation for members as well as provide Google, Yahoo, and MSN yahoo Style maps to help search bots.

Zorro..........SEO....Guy..........:-)