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Ok.. I have a new potential client that has many many wonderful products that are competitive but very worth while in going after.
Currently, her site is completely DB driven with very little content talking about the specific products.
Now.. I have a couple ideas on how I could go about doing this but I'd like to hear any other advise if possible on how they go about optimizing a dynamic ecommerce site where the image potentially sells more than the copy.
First idea...
They have several catagories of gift products (Corporate Gifts, House Warming Gifts, Get Well Soon gifts, etc) and in those categories they have more categories of gifts (Plates, Antique Clocks, etc).
Now.. my idea is to take each product type category and create static pages offering content about why these types of products make great gift ideas for the various occasion types.
Filling these pages with keyword rich sales and marketing copy then offering links to the actual product themselves.
Using this approach I can create effective keyword rich content for multitudes of products that ARE spridered and indexed by SE's yet still providing the customer with complete access and opportunity to select a product or browse the catalogue.
Right now, this is the only way I currently see to develop the spidering and indexing capabilities for her site and products while still keeping the dynamic aspect of the site intact.
Most of the ecommerce sites I have done are B2B sites with no need for SE access and of the dynamic catalogue sites I have done (many) they were for wholesalers offering their distributors an more efficient way of finding products and information - they didn't care about SE's to find new customers.
ANY ideas would be awesome.
Thanks.
Aaron
For the site I work on the content for the product pages is pulled out of a database, it sounds like a fairly similar set up with categories, subcategories etc. Its not hard to have your page titles, meta description, heading tags etc generated on the fly for each page with content from the database. I havn't done very much in this regard but the little I have done has meant many of these pages now rank well on google for the product codes (mostly people search with product codes in this industry) and bring in traffic and leads (B2B site).
I've also noticed that google is indexing more of my dynamic pages that weren't in the index before due to long URLs with too many parameters. It seems that google's indexing of dynamic pages is improving all the time.
Perhaps you would also look into mod_rewrite too for changing your file extensions to .html/.htm. I've heard that the .html extension will mean better ranking for your pages, but havn't got around to trying it myself yet.
I also do 'product focus' static html pages based around particular big sellers or products the company especially wants to be shifting with a view to getting them ranked and pulling in traffic, and certainly that works too.
A combination of static category index pages and optimising the dynamic pages on the fly as they're generated should work well for you.
thanks for your comments - very much appreciated.
The site has several problems in that there really is very little content in the way of product descriptions.
example on 2 products:
The Time Zone
What are the two most important things you never want to lose track of? Well...
Pro Golf Kit
Keep track of your score! Check the distance to the green ... or search for your partner out looking for his ball ...
For the above examples.. these titles and descriptions would appear for maxium of 6 products on each page of the category.
Once you lick into a product for more info...this is the you get:
Pro Golf Kit
Keep track of your score! Check the distance to the green... or search for your partner out looking for his ball with this professional golf set! Great for any golf lover!
This is the type of stuff I will have to deal with for each product.. well over a few hundred.
I think a quick short term solution might be the way I described above for now. To being drawing and generating SOME traffic to the site otherwise we are redeveloping an entire site's worth of content which I don't believe this customer is willing to spend that kinf o money for. They may, however, be willing to invest a grand or 2 into effective keyword rich and targeted sales copy for the product type catagories that link into the products themselves.
I don't know... its a really great and clean site.. first thought I would have thought my firm did the design on it (we'd have done much better though hehe) and they have dropped over $10 G's on offline advertising thus far and the response has been good but not quite the return they'd like.
For a few thousand they could reach a much larger and more targeted audience specificially looking ofr products they sell.
ONE more.. any idea on how to convert drynamic URLS into statis ones? I know how with mod_rewrite but they aren't using Apache - ideas?
More ideas would be awesome.
Thanks all!
Aaron
i don't know if theres any functionality in iis which would do it, but you could concevably pass requests to the database pages through a com componrnt which translated the htm requests to asp and then forwarded them on? probably more complicated than you need though.
perhaps members with more ms background than me can help you.
sorry for the dodgy typing, right arm's out of action today :-)
