Internal linking and dynamic pages

what would be best for SEO?

[lakester]

Hey everyone,
I'm an SEO newbie and I got a two part question if you guys don't mind answering :)

I run a site which features a lot of photo content. The site is presently a PR4 with many relative backlinks. I'm redesigning the site and trying to optimize it.

Part 1:

I have 1300+ pictures broken down into HTML gallery pages, with 9 pictures per page (approx 145 gallery pages). Each gallery page links to the homepage, the previous page, the next page and has a javascript dropdown box to go to any of the other 145 pages.

Each picture loads on a seperate HTML which links to to the homepage, the gallery page, the previous and next pages, and the javascript dropdown linking to the 1300 other pictures.

The thumbnails and full pics contain keywords in the ALT tags. The gallery/picture pages contain keywords in the title and have a H2 header at the top of the page with keywords.

Is this overdoing it? Are there too many internal links? Too many keywords? Also, would Google crawl the javascript dropdown?

Part 2:

Presently, all the files are HTML and the galleries were built with Arles Thumbnail Page Generator. Whenever I add new photos to the gallery, I'll have to rebuild and reupload all the HTML pages. This is obviously a pain in the butt.

I could easily use a PHP scripted program like Gallery where all the gallery pages are dynaimcally generated. Gallery uses Apache mod_rewrite to shorten URLs and take off the PHP extensions.

Would these dynamic pages be crawled by Google?

Which option would be the best for SEO? Static HTML pages or dynamic PHP/HTML pages?

Any tips, advice, etc are more than welcome!

Thanks!

[lakester]

bump :)

[John_Caius]

Part 1:
If it's good for your users then it's fine for SEO. If you're presenting the page in something other than its true light then it could cause you problems. Simple.

Part 2:
Google is good at either. If you have problems then avoid a question mark in the URL or anything called ID. SEO can be successful with either static or dynamic.

[bufferzone]

Part 1
I don’t think you can have to many internal links, quit on the contrary as a matter of fact. On the keyword issue, I sea a problem. Gallery pages have very little text. This means that they can’t carry many keywords if any at all. Most SE’s uses the text on the page heavily in determining what keywords are relevant for this page, if you have no (or little) text on the page, keywords in meta could be considered spam and at the least you would have a problem getting ok ratings. You need to create some text on your gallery pages. Make sure that this text contains your important keywords.

Part 2.
You should definitely use Apache mod_rewrite to shorten URLs and take off the PHP extensions and Google will crawl these links. If you can you should also create static html pages that links to your gallery pages. These static pages can contain optimized text and be made to hit high in the SERP’s. I would recommend that you create several static pages, one optimized page for each relevant keyword

[lakester]

if you have no (or little) text on the page, keywords in meta could be considered spam and at the least you would have a problem getting ok ratings. You need to create some text on your gallery pages. Make sure that this text contains your important keywords.

should this text be on the gallery page displaying the thumbnail, the picture page displaying the pic, or both?

also, since we're talking about either 145 pages or 1300 pages, it's kinda hard (and annoying) to type up different, keyword-optimized text for each page.

i think i already know the answer, but it would most likely be seen as spamming if i use the same paragraph on each page, right? probably the same if i rotate between 3-4 different paragraphs, right?

[bufferzone]

It probably would, and it wouldn’t be very efficient. This is why I recommend the use of flat html pages with links to the rest of your site. These pages can relatively easily be optimized to your relevant keywords and they can contain text