Hello everyone. I would like some help with organising the content on my website as I feel there must be a better way of doing it compared to what I am doing now. I would like my site to improve for SEO and also make it easier to change the whole layout of the site.

My website is a fansite for a music group. I use EE to display all of the news I post about the group. I have an index.php file in EE which has the layout of my site… it has the full html coding for the header, a PHP include function to include a sidebar, then the EE code that will display my news items, and then all of the html code for the footer. I then have another EE page that displays each news story individually, allowing for permalinks to news items. So this “article” page is nearly exactly the same as the index page, with a few adjustments.

The rest of my content is items such as song lyrics, biographies, discography etc. To display this I have a main.php file on my server, which is identical to the index.php file on EE, except instead of having the EE code it has an include code to include the relevant html page. So these pages have a url such as main.php?c=lyrics

I have read that these types of URLs are not very good for SEO and may explain why my website is currently poorly ranked on Google. This also means that when I change the layout for my site I will have more than one page to alter.

What I would like is some suggestions as to how I can manage my content better so the SEO improves and general mangement is more effective. I guess the first thing I could do is create sperate pages for my header and footer and include them like the sidebar? But how can I further improve my site? If anyone would like to see my site in action the address is www.sugababesuk.com

I would be extremely grateful for any suggestions people may have.

Thank you in advance.

Search engines are pretty good at indexing URL’s even if the URL’s have dynamic variables included. This only really becomes a problem if they are excessively long so something like main.php?c=lyrics shouldn’t be a reason why your site isn’t ranking in search results.

The most common issue that causes pages not being indexed by search engines is the page title being duplicated on every page. If all your pages have the same page title then I would look at fixing this first and put something more descriptive about the content on that page instead.

Also make sure your site has clear and consistent navigation. Main sections of your site should have a common navigation on all pages which tells search engines that these pages are important because your linking to them on every page.