: What should i be doing for seo as a programmer? I'm working on a niche classifieds/listings type site. What should i be doing to make each page on the site to be uniquely indexable by search

@Samaraweera270

Clean up URLs; try to remove '?' and '&', for instance, from the address of any page you want crawled.
Make sure that the words in the URL, the <title> tag, and <h*> all make sense and are related to each other and the page content.
Don't put anything in javascript that you want crawled.
Get signed up, and the site set up, for Google Analytics and Google's webmaster tools, including submitting a sitemap.
Basically set up a good web site, one that's clean, simple, and easy to use. A good exercise is to look at your site using a non-graphical browser like 'links' or 'lynx'. What you see there is what a crawler will see.
Watch your logs, both access and error, for clues as to what else you need to do. This will require using 'sort', 'uniq', 'awk', and their friends, so get familiar with them. (This is assuming you're on a Unix or Linux machine -- if you're on Windows, then cygwin will give you those.)

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@Angela700

What should i be doing to make each page on the site to be uniquely
indexable by search engines.


Create individual unique pages create an XML sitemap submit to Google and Bing. Be sure your robots.txt isn't blocking access or that you've used noindex or nofollow meta tags

You can manually add your meta tags it really doesn't matter how you create them so long as you have at the very least a title meta tag.


What type of url rewriting works best?


It doesn't matter how you re-write URL's the search engines can care less how they got that way. So re-write them however you want.

You don't have to include the categories or cities in the URL as much as the Title of the page, the content of the page. And incoming links will help more so with ranking your NYC page since you'll be competing with thousands of pages content wise you wont be able to compete IMHO, you'll need links lots of them to out rank say craigslist.

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