Before construction begins on my new dynamic site....

Basic principle of creating a spider-friendly dynamic site

[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 spider-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

[Navdeep]

hi
i want to know how meta keywords and meta description can be added to the dynamic pages to get good search engine ranking of dynamic pages.
can we add meta information hardcoded in the code like the static pages or we should add them dynamically. if you agree with adding the meta keywords and description dynamically them please let me know, how can i add it to 100 dynamic pages for different categories using different keywords for all categories.

[bmcgee]

The database should be constructed so that the category and product tables have MetaTitle, MetaDescription and MetaKeywords added to them. Then you can tie specific meta data to each Cat ID or Prod ID.

Then your dynamic pages can be programmed to grab those fields out of the database and display those meta tags.

[Navdeep]

what else should i do, other than adding meta data, to optimize my dynamic pages?

[Master_K]

I have a site exactly like you speak of. For my part what I concentrated on was 5 things. Some of this is obvious but I post it for those who may not know.

One, I don't pass any session Id's in the urls. Try using cookies and javascript stuff for user tracking. Keep your URL's simple. This will help get Deep Links for a dynamic site.

Two, the hompepage has tons of direct links to content not just a search box.

Three, The category a user is looking for is not cloaked in a number or something. if they are looking for an all purpose widget, then there is a variable passed like &cat=all%20purpose%20widget.

Four, that data is used to fill a part of the title tag, the keyword and the description tag.

Five, no tricks. Beyond building a good SE friendly structure I rely on the sites content to do the job.

Traffic has been climbing steadily and Florida made it almost double when tons of overly tricked out sites dropped like flies.

Good Luck

[sleepy]

Im also about to build a classified site and will be going up against an establshed competitor that is no. 1 in several key words I will be targeting. Whats worse is all their category/ad pages (3000+ pages) are htm files as they are entered by hand once a day. Is it possible to knock it off its perch with a PHP/mysql directory or will I always come second to a htm site?

steve

[rogerd]

Google is getting quite good at handling dynamic URLs (without session IDs), but these pages often seem to have lower PR/rankings than similarly linked static content. Master_K and others provide some good advice, but I'd add that translating the URLs to a static appearance will be good for your users as well as search engines. So, instead of "&cat=all%20purpose%20widget" consider "domain.com/products/all_purpose_widget.htm" or similar. Keyword URLs are considered to be either still fine or problematic in the post-Florida world, so use your judgment as to how to structure and/or hyphenate them.

[sleepy]

at the moment my ad pages will potentially look something like this...

www.........com/my.php/3fd5cd0b77a1f/?action=view_ad&adID=473&sort=s2&sort_order=1

... whicj I assume is real bad. Any suggestions how I make the changes others have recommended. Im kinda new to php.

Thanks.

[bmcgee]

Way too many parameters, in my opinion, to have a chance to get indexed by Google. Keep the number of parameters to 2 or less in your querystring.

[jatar_k]

as far as changing long var filled urls, it has nothing to do with php except for the fact that most programmers, in any language, know and care nothing for SEM/SEO.

Give this a read, not simple but very effective

An Introduction to Redirecting URLs on an Apache Server [webmasterworld.com]

[Navdeep]

thanks master_K for your kind suggestions.
thanks all