Principles of Google-Friendly Dynamic sites

Construction is about to begin & prevention is better than cure

[yonnermark]

Hello all,
I have just commissioned a small firm to create a dynamic website for me. Think of it as a classified ads site for a very specific widget where users can come and create adverts to sell their widgets.

The success of the site relies very much on getting good listings within google so before work actually begins I was hoping someone could outline some of the basic principles of google-friendly dynamic site design.

I've read about session_ids and parsing the dynamic url so that it appears to be static but what are the other things to remember?

If you need more info before you can respond, just ask, I'll reply very quickly.

Thanks a lot everyone
Mark

[GoogleGuy]

Hey, check out your site with a text browser like Lynx. Definitely have a site map--it's good for users and search engines. Try to avoid fancy stuff like cookies, session IDs, dynamic urls, Flash, framesets unless you really have to. Googlebot can crawl better than most spiders, but lots of search engines have trouble with stuff like what I mentioned. Definitely check out our webmaster pages as well:
[google.com...]

There's lots of good reading and guidelines there. :)

[bcolflesh]

Try to avoid fancy stuff like cookies, session IDs, dynamic urls, Flash, framesets unless you really have to.

Thanks GG - I wish the sentence above was on the \webmaster page of every engine!

[too much information]

I definately agree with the site map. I recently set one up on a redesigned site and Googlebot crawled the entire site in record time.

The previous design took a month or two for all of the pages to be indexed because it went so deep.

If you have a form that sends people to a dynamically created page, also put links below the form that go to each version of that page if it's not an ourtageous number of links.

[yonnermark]

That's useful to know.
Thanks everyone