Forum Moderators: buckworks
Our site was built before 2000 in asp and is really hurting us in our developement of search engine friendly content. I have spent quite some time reviewing companys that either do SEO or ppc or Web design or usability design but I need them all in one. We have a beautiful ecommerce site where our identity must stay intact but we need more from our site as far as organic traffic and usability while maintaining style.
We currently have 620 pages indexed on google and are doing well as we can with those pages but we are competing with 100k to 200k page optimized websites. I have heard that PHP sites are very popular right now and are indexing very well. Does one code language index better then another? I am at a bit of a loss for putting all the pieces together. If you have any suggestions on a strategy to find what we need I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks!
[edited by: lorax at 2:22 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2006]
[edit reason] snipped solicitations [/edit]
I really don't think that switching from asp to php is going to make a bit of difference as long as you have an experienced SEO. We're 100% asp and rank much better than most of our non-asp competitors. In fact, the only one that ranks better is also an asp site.
ASP or PHP will not make a tad of difference to SE's. Both are server side scripting languages that produce a page of HTML (what the SE sees).
The resultant page, will make a small difference, but it really doesn't matter which scripting language you use to get there!
Today the actual content doesn't make that much difference to SE's. For "lesser searched terms" the Title, Description, and page content have an impact, for the big money terms it is more about links than page quality!
Any SEO you hire needs to be a good link builder. Any website designer you hire needs to incorporate an easy to maintain link building strategy into the design.
Plain HTML written by hand or in a Wysiwyg program really doesn't cut it today. For link building you need ASP or PHP, which one is pure technical preference of your design team :)
One other thing, what do you all think of micro-sites? I have been doing reasearch there and I cant tell if they are just doorway pages hosted on other ip's or what. Sounds like it may be a tad "black hatish" if thats the correct term. I dont want to be banned!
I have heard that PHP sites are very popular right now and are indexing very well. Does one code language index better then another?
your current site is in ASP - this may have URLs like .../filename.asp?id=123&page=456&wotsit=789
these are not search engine friendly
same thing happens with PHP - and even worse is the session ID in PHP which can make your URLs into something like .../filename.php?id=123&page=456&wotsit=789&PHPSESSID=2340723047203497203847234872304872304983498
this is NOT good!
(without going into great detail) PHP is generally run on a *nix box with Apache web server - this allows you to use something called mod_rewrite (rewriting URLs) by using .htaccess files - the above PHP URL could be changed to look something like ..../optimised-web-page-with-keywords-in-the-url.html - this is much better for search engines and will normally help with your search engine rankings - downside is it takes some learning to get it right so could be worth employing a developer (and experienced developer!) to do this for you
if you want more info, best to search for mod_rewrite and .htaccess - plenty of threads about it on webmasterworld
so IMO, definitely worth a rebuild using PHP and mod_rewrite
mod_rewrite is available on IIS as a commercial API.
Yes, see [webmasterworld.com...] (and I'll add Qwerksoft to the list on that thread).
so IMO, definitely worth a rebuild using PHP and mod_rewrite
Also Does anyone know if when that rewrite is done will my webtrends data reflect those individual product page names? as of now it lumps all our product pages into one column of data product.asp so I dont know exactly how may page views each product gets.
And...I am in the dark on how some comparable sites have 100x more pages then us. I mean 150k pages for 150 products? What in the world. We have that many products but are maxing out at 700 pages.
I have a mixed html and asp site with a asp catalog. I am well indexed, looked into using a rewrite software and for several reasons decided it was not worth the effort. Improvement is seo ranking was projected to be negilable, The only benefit was a couple of generic keywords in the url and those repeated many times.
The number of pages indexed may be veryyyyy misleading, right now I am showing 34K pages indexed. But I know there are not more than about 4000 pages that exist. See some of the supplemental threads for some idea of how that happens.
Look into how your software is generating meta tags, mostly title and descriptions. If they are on point and generally unique you should be ok.
Then look to links and on page depth of content
If so I have the same problem. I have had several people look at it with out a resolution. I have been told that it takes a log based stats program to track dymanic pages acturately. If you find out differently I would appreciate a sticky mail. Maybe if you contacted thier tech support. I am a free user and do not have that option.
So you sell a widget. For all those that search for "widget" you need only one page. But, hang on, what if they search for "black widget" or "white widget" or "blue widget" or "widget in California" or "widget in Texas".......the list is endless! Billions of pages optimized to sell a widget!
This is the exact reason you need a scripting language!
I want to sell a widget in smallville, smallstate, some country & everywhere like it, how many pages do I need for that? One seems like the obvious answer, but, in free SERP's the true answer is millions, and when extrapolated to the World it becomes Billions to Trillions!
Try some odd searches on any engine and look at the results. People creating endless pages of stuff to get a click! If you want to compete you have to play their game :)
