To www or not to www

Choose which ever you prefer and redirect all the others over to it.

To redirect from non www to www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainname.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomainname.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To redirect from www to non www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Adjust the audio/video/image/blog listing pages

If you use a duplicate content checker to check the following urls:

• http://v3.phpmotion.com/videos
• http://v3.phpmotion.com/videos/load/recent

You will see they are both identical. To correct this you could (should) change the links in the template files (themes/yourtheme/templates/main_1.htm) to point to videos/load/recent or vice-versa.

But we don’t want to lose any existing value on the old links do we? So we’ll just add a 301 redirect so everyone knows to use the other link from now on. Add the following line after RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^videos(/?)$ videos/load/recent [R=301,L]

If you chose to replace all videos/load/recent links with just videos you should use this code:

RewriteRule ^videos/load/recent(/?)$  videos [R=301,L]

Now you just need to do similar for each of the media links in the main menu (audios, blogs & images). You only need to do this for the load/recent links the other load/featured, etc… should be fine.

If done correctly (once you make the changes make sure that they work!) then you’ll have just done yourself a favor. Also if you don’t already use Google Webmaster tools then make sure you check it out! It will help show issues with your website and also give you some info like the top search queries, etc..

Let me know if you find it useful and I’ll get started on more posts!

Do not use duplicate title & meta tags!

This is easily missed as the keyword & description tags are invisible to regular visitors, they only show up within the source code. Having the same titles on different pages is missing out on a great opportunity for getting some keywords picked up in search engines.

For example the featured, recent, most viewed & most commented videos all have the same title & meta tags! This is not good!

Here’s a simple way of fixing this and can be used in pretty much any of the .php files:

$page_title = "Your page title will go here! - $site_name";
$description = "Enter a description for the page here, descriptions are often used as the small part of text that shows in search results and shouldn't exceed 150 or so characters (the amount Google display in results).";
$keywords = "comma,separated,words,or short, search keywords";

Meta keywords aren’t used so much now as the search engines prefer to scan the actual content of your page rather then trust what you enter.

So where do you stick this code into your files? Most of the time anywhere before this will be fine except in certain files (more on that in a bit):

$TBS 			= new clsTinyButStrong;

Try it out now in category_home.php.

But wait I hear you say, I want to display the name of the category! Good thinking! So here’s how you go about it, take the code had earlier with a few minor adjustements:

$page_title = "Watch $channel videos – $site_name";
$description = "View all videos in the $channel category, watch, rate and comment on $channel videos.";
$keywords = "$channel, $channel videos, popular $channel vids";

Now that’s much better. Of course you can (and should) take this a lot further. Remember you will need to replace $channel with other variables (and don’t forget to change the descriptions & keywords around a bit). Some pages not to miss are seemore.php ($see_more_title), audio.php (also $see_more_title).

If you find this useful let me know below! Any questions just ask!

Update: How to add this for sub categories
At the bottom of the file just before adding the above code add the following:

if($sub > 0) {
	$channel = $channel_name;
}