If you are looking for greater dynamism, scalability, and user-friendliness than HTML pages, you should opt for PHP, which is a much more effective side server language. However, search engine optimization becomes tougher when it comes to PHP. PHP developers have to face a number of technical problems in the process of creating PHP scripts according to search engine optimization guidelines. Read on to know more about some of these technical problems and how to tackle them smoothly.
The latency of a PHP script matters a lot here. The time within which a PHP code can be executed counts for a lot when it comes to determining its SEO friendliness. If a web crawler goes through your PHP page and tries to follow a link, it may decide to ignore your PHP page if the server takes too long a time to execute the PHP code. If you want the loop code to be optimized and reduce slowdowns, you need to cut down on the number of SELECT calls. If you use SELECT on a table containing ten fields when you are looking to select just one, you are encouraging the script to slow down. You should instead name the columns you need to retrieve, If you use MySQL, you can test the queries by using the EXPLAIN statement. If the loops need to be made friendlier to search engines, use a duplicate code that does not need to be repeated frequently as well as static values like count values, for instance.
Another problem often encountered here is that of the session ID. If you have turned on the option of ‘enable-trans-sid’ it will create links with the session ID numbers. This ensures that your links will be very lengthy and also give a list of different URLs with similar content to web crawlers, resulting into hassles in indexing pages. This snag can be avoided by disabling ‘trans-ID’ option in php.ini by setting the ‘session-trans-sid’ to false. It is also possible to do this by adding the php_flag session.use_trans_sid off to the .htaccess file in the root directory.
