The Brett 26 raises questions for newbie

keyword, titles content etc in dynamic pages

[jasperx]

I just got through a read of Brett's excellent 26 suggestions to building a successful site. There was more content there than in a half dozen courses I took. Right after getting my table tags down cold, I decided that I would dive into asp to build database driven sites and am now trying to get a handle on php. In making this jump it is obvious that I missed out on some very important basics.

Here are the questions...
1) If content is king and tying content to keywords and titles, headings and URLs then it stands to reason that it doesn't do much good to come up with one set of meta tags to put in a header and use with an include on every page in the site.... this either blows away one of the most fabulous time saving features for building and maintaining dynamic sites or I need to come up with a scheme where I store unique metas for each page and dynamically write them into the header?
2) It isn't clear to me whether spiders are able to see content which is stored in a database.... one of my sites has several hundred articles which have been stored in a database to facillitate non technical staff maintaining it with form interfaces. It would seem that this type of material would be just the good stuff needed to get the site recognised but it may not be visible? Not sure I know a workaround for this one?

[Wired Suzanne]

I'm not sure how the guys at our development department did the header thing, but I'm sure someone can tell you this.
I just wanted to say that our datbase content gets spidered.
We sell widgets. As soon as a user asks for a certain widget, the page is being created for them. Blue Widget pages, Large widget pages, Widget- search result pages, etc The page is always same, the content is different. Our whole site is database driven.
Our pages get indexed well. It seems that Google is getting better and better at spidering static and dynamic pages. Expecially since two months. I guessed that our site had between 2,500 and 3,000 possible pages. However, this month Google indexed 11,000 pages....... Meta tags, content, titles, are all database driven and are all index correctly. Ranking well too.

[Dolemite]

1) If content is king and tying content to keywords and titles, headings and URLs then it stands to reason that it doesn't do much good to come up with one set of meta tags to put in a header and use with an include on every page in the site.... this either blows away one of the most fabulous time saving features for building and maintaining dynamic sites or I need to come up with a scheme where I store unique metas for each page and dynamically write them into the header?

First of all, meta keywords and meta description just aren't that important these days. You won't lose much (if anything) by leaving them out completely. That said, I've found it relatively easy to generate them dynamically.

2) It isn't clear to me whether spiders are able to see content which is stored in a database.... one of my sites has several hundred articles which have been stored in a database to facillitate non technical staff maintaining it with form interfaces. It would seem that this type of material would be just the good stuff needed to get the site recognised but it may not be visible? Not sure I know a workaround for this one?

As long as these articles are visible in HTML, use server-side scripting, and are well-linked, they'll be found and spidered. Of course spiders can't directly crawl your database, which is why you have to pay attention to link structures and make sure there are still links to old/archived material that you think might still be useful to users and want to get spidered. I'd also recommend checking pages in Sim Spider [searchengineworld.com] to see what spiders see when crawling your site.

[willybfriendly]

"1) If content is king and tying content to keywords and titles, headings and URLs then it stands to reason that it doesn't do much good to come up with one set of meta tags to put in a header and use with an include on every page in the site.... this either blows away one of the most fabulous time saving features for building and maintaining dynamic sites or I need to come up with a scheme where I store unique metas for each page and dynamically write them into the header?"

In PHP:

<? include "config.php";?>
<head>
<title><? echo $title;?></title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><? echo $title;?></h1>
...

"2) It isn't clear to me whether spiders are able to see content which is stored in a database.... one of my sites has several hundred articles which have been stored in a database to facillitate non technical staff maintaining it with form interfaces. It would seem that this type of material would be just the good stuff needed to get the site recognised but it may not be visible? Not sure I know a workaround for this one?"

mod_rewrite

Visit the PHP forum :)

WBF