July 4, 2008

Optimising dynamic websites

Search Engine Optimisation

On page search engine optimisation opportunities are rife with a dynamic site. Ensure these dynamic pages have their html <TITLE> tag populated dynamically from the database where possible. For products, use the product name, add this to the meta keywords tag along with the department name. Ensure the product name is also displayed on the page using <H1> to <H6> tags instead of some custom css class like .productTitle.

Querystrings - pages with "&","?" and "="

Technologies like active server pages, perl, php and cold fusion allow information stored in a database to be displayed dynamically on a page. What this means in practice is that there is a single 'news' or 'product' page, where the content is imported from the database, and displayed according to what a user selects.

www.some-website.net/stock.php?product=books&category=nonfiction

In the past, the question mark and equals sign sometimes prevented some search engine spiders from indexing all of the content on your site. There are a number of ways to overcome this, one of which is having the web server re-write the web address on the fly. This converts the punctuation marks into directories, which a spider can follow, so the above example might become something like:

www.some-website.net/product_books/category_nonfiction/stock.php

The above URL would be easily followed by any search engine spider, thereby increasing your visiblity.

In practice, these days querystrings present little problem to search engine spiders.

Session ID's

A session id is a long string of letters and numbers used to identify a vistor as being unique, and allows dynamic pages to track information as you move from one page to another. A classic example would be on a shopping site, where multiple products can be added to a shopping cart, before checking out.

http://b72b6ba9a8a3a251f91e7b4c378b5790.some-other-site.com/special-offer.php

You can see exactly this type of session id in action by clicking the 'shopping' tab at www.powersport.co.uk

The problem is that a page using a session ID never has the same web address twice. This means that if a spider begins to index a site, it is assigned a session id; the search engine then stores the web address with the session id and can never find it again.

back to the faq