Robot.txt

Robot.txt is a text file which is used to instruct the search engines for how to crawl and index the pages on your site. The search engines should be obey the robot.txt. The search engine follow the instruction specified by robot.txt file. If you want to some of your pages are not crawl by search engine, then you can protect that pages in robot.txt. Then the search engine don't crawl particular pages specified by your robot.txt file.

The search engine comes to your robot.txt file before it crawl to your pages. It must be placed in your main directory. Otherwise, it can not able to find robot.txt file in your server.

Syntax:
                User-agent: *
                Allow: /
       where,
                 User-agent represents the search engines.
                 Allow means the robot.txt file allow the all search engines to crawl all of your contents.

Disallow the all crawlers by robot.txt:
                User-agent: *
                Disallow:  /
Now, the search engine don't crawl and index your pages.

Disallow the particular folder by robot.txt:
                User-agent: *
                Disallow:  /sample/example.php
 Now, the search engine don't index example.php file in sample folder.

Robots meta tags by robot.txt:
 It control the individual pages present in search result. It should be present within head tag.
For example,
          <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
           The above line instructs the search engine to don't show this page in search result. 

Disallow the particular search engine by robot.txt:
              If you want to restrict particular search engines don't index your pages, then you can use robot.txt to restrict it.

Syntax:
              User-agent: Googlebot
              Disallow: / 
                  Now all the search engines index your pages except google. Googlebot is the search engine of google.

Source: http://www.phponwebsites.com/2013/12/robottxt.html

6 Tips For Designing an SEO Friendly Website

It’s not enough these days to design a beautiful, functional website that addresses your clients needs. If you truly want your client to reap the benefits of having an online presence, then SEO is a necessity. Search Engine Optimization is a method of improving the visibility of a website in search engines through organic search results, and is now a viable online marketing tool for a lot of businesses.

Through the following design practices you can improve a website’s SEO and ultimately their visibility. With these foundations in place, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing the website you spent hours designing (and developing) is now a top contender for search engine visibility. You may also find some of these tactics also go far in improving user experience as well.

Keywords

Keywords are an important part of any search engine optimization campaign. If you’re using the wrong keywords, search engines and your target market may never find you. It’s important when starting a website to first establish what the business objectives are. Do you want to target a local area, national or global? With this plan in place you can then build pages that target these specific keywords, or decide where these pages may go down the line once the foundation is built.

The process of creating
1. Create a list of potential keywords (i.e. words that are relevant but not overly used)
2. Input your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool (i.e. Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, Wordstream, etc)
3. Finalize your keyword list based on research (Create a list of both broad and targeted keywords)
4. Prepare them for launch (typically go after 3-4 related keywords per page)

Keyword Placement

For a website to successfully integrate into Google you first must tell us what a particular page is about. It’s important to get keywords on the right position on the page, but don’t overdo it. Here are the best places:

• Title tag
• Meta description and keywords
• Website slogans
• Navigation
• Breadcrumb trails
• H1, H2 and H3 tags
• Bullet points
• Alt text
• Title attribute on links
• The main website copy
• Internal links
• Footer links
• URL’s
• File / folder names

Search Engine Friendly Navigation

Having Search Engine Friendly Navigation basically means creating a structure that search engines can follow. A major culprit in search engines not being able to find a website is due to the links being images instead of text. So make sure you address this and all links and buttons are text-based. CSS3 can achieve the same effects that Photoshop can, which has contributed a lot in terms of modernizing the web and speeding up load times. Wherever possible, try to avoid the use of JavaScript, as search engines find it difficult to understand and may result in crawling issues. With the push towards mobile devices supporting the web, using advanced scripting languages on your website won’t fly so well, either.

URL’s and Filenames

Having an SEO-friendly URL means search engines can quickly identify what a page is about. It’s also a good tactic to include keywords in the URL as this increases Search Engine visibility.

An example of a not too friendly URL:

http://www.websitestore.com/products/item1?=20193

A better, more descriptive URL would be:

http://www.websitestore.com/home/furniture/ottomans

As you can see, the second option has a better selection of rich keywords, which will help the search engine in their efforts to index you.

It’s also a good habit to name your images using descriptive keywords. An appropriate file name can be the difference between your image appearing in Google images searches or not. For instance the name “1234.jpg” isn’t going to be as successful as “midcentury-furniture.jpg” when someone is looking for design inspiration.

Website Images

• Images are often an overlooked aspect of SEO, but play just as an important role in the process.

• You need to optimize your images to achieve faster loading times and subsequent search engine visibility.

• Try to keep your images’ file size as small as possible so mobile visitors in addition to those with slow internet connections can get the same intended, fast experience.

• An optimal image size is anywhere from 30-100kb and the best resolution is 72dpi.

• You can also set the image size as part of the corresponding tag for the image.

• It’s best to place your images on context in the page. The more relevant the text around your image, the better results you’ll get for rankings.

• Place your images inside a folder named “images” or something similar so the final URL of the image looks something like this: /images/image.jpg.

Perfect Website Optimization explains how to incorporate keywords into your alt tag.

Social Media

Social Media should be part of your SEO strategy as building relationships and interacting with connections can help build your brand enormously. Not only that but it gives you exposure and helps build a trusted community and gain credibility.

Link building is perhaps the number one reason to jump on board the Social Media bandwagon: the process of visitors sharing links within their own network can result in a large number of inbound links. In summary, social media can provide an organization with an affordable channel that accomplishes results.

Get started by joining:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Digg

Additional Resources

This guide by Google is a very helpful guide in learning about SEO.

55 Quick Seo Tips Even Your Mother Would Love.

Monitor where you stand with Google Toolbar and Alexa.

 Source From: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/design-seo-friendly-website/

Solarium is an opensource Solr client library for PHP applications

By offering an API for common Solr functionality you no longer need to compose complex querystrings and parameters manually, greatly reducing development time and complexity. Take a look at the examples shown above for a first impression. To get a good view of the difference compared to other Solr clients or manual requests see Why Solarium?

Some Solarium features:

Facet support

Complex facet queries a supported. Multiple facet types, global and per-facet options, tagging, excluding and more!

Query building API

Instead of manually creating a querystring and params you can use an API. This API also allows for easy modification of existing queries. The complete API has phpdocs to integrate with IDE features like autocompletion.

Complex update queries

Easily combine multiple add, delete, commit, optimize and/or rollback commands into a single update query. No more XML building.

Query inheritance

In Solarium a query is represented by an object. By using standard class inheritance for these objects together with the API you effectively get query inheritance, a very powerful concept.

Plugin system

The plugin system allows you to customize almost any part of Solarium. It's also used by Solarium itself for offering optional functionality, so it doesn't get bloated.

DisMax support

Enabling DisMax for a select query is just a single API call or config setting. All features, including boost parameters, are supported. Basic edismax support is also available.

Configuration mode

Almost all parts of Solarium can be created based on a config file. Instead of creating very complex queries with lots of API calls you can define them in a config file. The object created after loading the config file can still be modified using the API.

Spatial search

While very useful, the Solr Spatial functions and filters can be somewhat complex to write. Solarium offers an easy to use API for this (by means of a query helper)

MoreLikeThis

Get similar documents for your search results using MoreLikeThis (MLT). Solarium offers a query API to set MLT options and a result API to easily retrieve the MLT results for a search result.

Highlighting

Get highlighted matches for field values using Highlighting (HL). Solarium offers a query API to set HL options and a result API to easily retrieve the HL results for a search result document.

Grouping support

Solr grouping (also referred to as ‘field collapse’) is supported. You can group query results on field values, queries, or even both.

Querystring builder with escaping

Inserting (user)data into a querystring? With built-in term and phrase escaping you can do this safely. To make this even easier to use a special querystring builder somewhat similar to SQL prepared statements is available.

Reference: http://www.solarium-project.org/