Out of the box, Clipshare’s inbuilt seo leaves alot to be desired – this guide is an attempt to overcome the main issues of search engine optimization within the clipshare script. Clipshare essentially has one page that is optimized for search engines, that is the View Video page. Every other page on the website shares the exact same page title, page description and page keywords – read below to find out how to create unique titles, descriptions and keywords for the pages of your choice.
You can apply this guide to your websites in around 10minutes, it should help you gain more organic traffic without diluting your pages down. The SEO guide for Clipshare was originally written based on using the Forbidden theme from Freshsubject, there may be some differences with the default themes – if you have any issues just post a comment below and i’ll offer my advice.
UPDATE: the search engine optimization guide for clipshare turned out to be alot longer than i had originally planned, so i’ve split it up into two parts – you can read part2 here.
The Forbidden or Allowed themes are a great way to give a much needed boost to your Clipshare website, featuring valid xhtml and css code with correctly structured code for SEO, you can view the themes here.
Editing head1.tpl for SEO
Step1 – Involves editing the template file head1.tpl located in the templates folder.
Change:
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
To:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
What this code change does is tell the search engines not to index your website, you may not understand why this is important but i will explain it. In the Clipshare script, like many other video scripts there is a distinct lack of original content as the same videos show up on hundreads of pages from user playlists to their uploaded videos. Once we tell the search engines not to index the site we can select pages inwhich we do want indexed, pages that will show up in the search engines – For instance we want the view_video page to show up first for a particular video and not the Friends video page.
Make a list of the pages we do want indexed
Step2 – Involves choosing the correct pages to be indexed
So now we have to make a descision on the best pages (template files) to index on our site, these pages will feature heavily in the search engines. The pages to be indexed are;
- Index Page – Frontpage of your video site
- Channel Detail Page – Each channel on our website will be indexed
- Channels Page – Indexed as link between our index and channel detail page
- View Video Page – The video page, each video uploaded has a unique page
- Individual Tags Page – Each tag has a seperate page created (optional)
So the above is a list of the pages we will be indexing, please note that there are not 5 pages above but 5 section of possible pages above. What i mean is that if your website has 100 videos uploaded to it, each with their own title, description and tags and each video has 2 different tags then we already have a possible further 300 pages to be indexed (100 unique video pages and 200 tag pages – 2×100). We are ofcourse not counting the channel detail pages inwhich you can also have any number of channels.
The choice between Channels and Videos
I made the descision on how i wanted my site to be indexed, whether I wanted the video page to be my main link between the View Video page or my Channel Detail page. I picked the Channel Detail page because it has the ability to display unique content whereas the video page is simply a list of latest video’s added. If you would like to index the video’s page also then you can add it to the list above.
So your site structure will be as follows:
Index -> channels -> channel_detail -> view_video
an example of a site using this structure would be;
Footballvideo site -> list of football teams -> liverpool football videos -> steven gerrards goal against chelsea permier league game video
The above example should give you a clear image of what we are trying to achieve in this guide. If your not sure on step2 then please write in the comments below.
Create a new header tpl file
Step3 – Creation of a new header file that will allow the discussed pages to be indexed
Create a copy of the head1.tpl file you edited in step1 and rename this file head_seo.tpl, once this has been done open up your head_seo.tpl file and change;
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
To:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
This is the new header file that will also allow us to add unique content to the pages discussed above in the form of Title, Description and Keywords.
I will also explain some specific template mods on how to display a unique description on your Channel Detail page using your channel description text inwhich you entered in the siteadmin.
A View Video page edit is not required because it already contains unique content such as the Title and Description of the video.
Additional changes now need to be made in head_seo.tpl that will allow you to enter unqiue titles and descriptions, so change;
<title>{$site_name}</title>
<meta name="description" content="{$meta_description}" />
<meta name="keywords" content="{$meta_keywords}" />
To:
<title>{$meta_title}</title>
<meta name="description" content="{$meta_description}" />
<meta name="keywords" content="{$meta_keywords}" />
This is the end of editing the head_seo.tpl file so save and upload to your templates directory.
Setting up our unique page titles and descriptions
Step4 – Editing our .php files to include our unique titles and descriptions
Before we get stuck into this i will show you what files are associated with which page, although it is pretty self-explanatory it can be a tad confusing for someone who’s new to Clipshare.
channels.tpl -> channels.php
Index.tpl -> index.php
In this step we will be creating our unique titles and descriptions for the channels page and the index page, the channel_detail page is a little more complicated and requires a new header file to be created so that will be explained in step5.
Open channels.php and change;
STemplate::display('head1.tpl');
To:
STemplate::display('head_seo.tpl');
Now you need to add your title, description and keywords and you do this by adding;
STemplate::assign('meta_title','Your channels title here | Your site name');
STemplate::assign('meta_description','Description of this page');
STemplate::assign('meta_keywords','tags, tags2, tags3');
Below the part you just changed in the channels.php file. If your unsure of what to add, i’ve written an example of a channels page for a ficticious football website called FootballTube
STemplate::assign('meta_title','Football Teams Videos | FootballTube');
STemplate::assign('meta_description','Selection of football league and trick videos from both englands professional and amateur teams such as manchester united, liverpool and chelsea');
STemplate::assign('meta_keywords','football team videos, football team traning videos, englands football videos, videos of professional football teams, professional football vids,');
So to add a unique title and descrption to your index page, you do exactly the same thing as above but change the information you add in, such as meta_title. This step can be used on any page you want to create a unique title for such as videos or community pages and does not need to be restricted to just your channels / index pages.
RECAP
So far we’ve decided on a site structure to follow and have created unique title, description and keyword tags for both the index page and the channels page. You can use the exact same instructions layed out in step4 to create unique title, description and keywords tags for additional pages such as the community page and/or the videos page.
Click to read part2 of the Clipshare Search Engine Optimization Guide
