SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
SEO Strategies for a Dynamic Website
Is
your website is dynamic? You need to be careful, or you
might not do well in the search engines.
Some spiders handle dynamic URLs quite well, but
others have trouble – and even those that do spider them
might not look
very deep within your site. The problem lies in the fact
that you cannot really predict what will be delivered in
these URLs at all times. If you have an inkling of what is
going to happen to URLs most often plan ahead; try to insure
that you do not run into problems regarding these URLs.
Dynamic
web pages are usually database driven and displayed on-the-fly. You can recognize by looking for symbols like
question marks and ampersands in the URL. These on-the-fly
web pages are hard to deal with because they very every time
that they are delivered. The best way to conquer this problem
is to run everything that you can through the URL rather
than through post method or through sessions/cookies.
If
you want to sell one or two products, then you only need
a static website with one or two pages. If you have
a database with hundreds of products, however, then it would be very
time-consuming to make each page manually – that’s when most
people build a dynamic website.
These
dynamic web sites should be organized in such a way that
every page that has the potential to become dynamic
can be delivered in a static form as well. I.E. your product
listings pages may display certain categories dynamically,
but they should have static links that will simply display
every product. You should also have distinct links
to each category as most search engines can handle a dynamic URL
as long as it doesn’t change each time that the site is viewed.
There are programs that will automatically produce static
pages from a database, but it’s not usually the best move.
Most designers to work with true dynamic technologies such
as PHP, because of the amount of time it saves. Because search
engine technology is increasing, the problems associated
with dynamic URLs are decreasing day by day. It is still
important to have constants, but you don’t necessarily have
to have a huge list of static links throughout your site.
It can be much easier to put www.domain.com/article.php?num=1
than www.domain.com/articles/article1.html. A search engine
can easily locate the prior so there is no real need for
the latter. The only time that you will see trouble is if
you have things like www.domain.com/article?num=1&userid=2424
where “userid” changes for each user. If this sort of thing
happens you may run into trouble and should arrange so that
the “userid” isn’t completely necessary (unless, of course,
you want the page password protected).
Dynamic
websites aren’t usually engine friendly, though,
unless you deliberately make them that way. If you’ve spent
money and time to build a dynamic website then you won’t
want to throw it out – you need to learn how to optimize
it for the search engines.
So
how can you keep the functionality of your dynamic website,
and make it search engine friendly at the same time? Well,
suppose you have a website with products, and instead of
having each product on one page you’re using a dynamic, searchable
database. Searching returns a list of products that meet
the search criteria, and maybe a small picture – clicking
the picture shows the user more information about the product.
You have to realize that search engines can’t use your search
box, so the only way for them to access your dynamic information
is if they follow a link to it some other way. The lesson
to learn is that you need to give access to all your pages
with plain, text links, somehow – you can’t just rely on
searches to drive your whole site.
What this means is that somewhere on your website you
need to have a list of your products that has been organized
by
category – from here, you should be able to follow links
to every page in your database. Once you’ve done this, the
search engines can see your content.
Offering both search and category views improves your site’s
navigation, as well as making it crawlable – your work will
be useful to your visitors as well as the search engines,
which is what SEO is all about.
