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Just getting started in the game and very pleased to have found this site. What a gold mine! It's very nice to meet you all!
There are loads of posts relating to ASP and dynamic submission in general but I have to be honest, I am finding it a little tricky to seperate the wood from the trees at the moment. Very sorry if this is repetition for you all.
My site is totally ASP and I am getting conflicting info on how to submit to search engines succesfully. The options that have been suggested so far are:
1. Submit Site Map page.
2. Create mini site.
3. Use doorway pages.
I'm pretty sure that the Site Map otion will not work for me because all pages are ASP and based on Dreamweaver templates.
Doorway pages on their own seem to have a very bad reputation and low submission success rate so am loathed to go with them.
My best option would appear to be the mini site. I am currently planning to create a html site, rich in keyword content gleaned from the PPC search suggestion tools.
I would be really grateful to hear any suggestions and advice that you might have as to how best to appraoch this.
TIA
SirNutty (UK)
What are you looking to submit to. My sites are always asp based and I never submit. If you are looking at PFI(Pay for Inclusion, ink and ask) then I would suggest the pages you want included. Stay away from doorways and mini sites. A site map is good for nonpfi spiders, but PFI only spiders pages you pay for. Google will spider your site as long as you get a link from a site already in the index. With asp are you using query strings?
It's the non PFI spiders that concern me because most of the internal URL strings contain?'s and I am fast learning that search engines do not like them.
My other reason for using a mini site is because of Meta tags and Dreamweaver templates. I have been told (not here!) that I will need seperate pages because my entire site is based on Dreamweaver templates and if I update 1 template with certain Meta tags, it will apply those same meta tags throughout the entire site when I need different tags for different pages. Is this right?
Once you are able to rewrite (parse) the urls, now you have to figure out a way to get the spiders into the content. This is where internal linking within the site comes into play. For example, if you were a directory and needed to show regional listings, I might build a page or two that discusses the regional listings section while developing a left hand navigation that contains a list of urls leading into the database. This gives the spidering SE's some food for thought. Without a link into the data, they won't find it.
In reference to your meta data issues. Build a new template for the database pages. Exclude the meta data from that template. Then add this for title...
<title><%=rstemp("sitetitle")%> - <%=rstemp("country")%></title>
And this for description...
<meta name="description" content="<%=rstemp("shortdesc")%>">
For the above to work, there needs to be data in the database to populate your template.
Stay away from doorway pages if you can. Your biggest success will come in the rewriting (parsing) of the urls and setting up links throughout your site that lead to the database content.
I have one site that I manage where we have 3 templates that are populated from the database. Those three templates generate over 300 pages for that site. And no, static html pages are not generated. The templates are populated based on a query from a search or from a visited link.
Makes a lot of sense what you guys are saying as I was getting a little worried about the extra work load I was dumping on myself.
Had absolutely no idea about URL parsing or that Meta tags could be populated dynamically! Are you guys aware of any past threads or sites that discuss these aspects in greater detail (for future reference)?
Had absolutely no idea about URL parsing or that Meta tags could be populated dynamically!
Almost everything can be populated dynamically from a database. I had no idea about url parsing either up until a few years ago. At that time, it was something that very few talked about or even knew could be done.
Use the Site Search function of the forums and enter terms like "url parsing", "dynamic content", etc. and you should find enough reading to keep you busy for the next few months! ;)
P.S You can also do a search in your favorite SE for "IISRewrite" or "ASAPI Rewrite" and most likely find the information you are searching for.
[edited by: pageoneresults at 6:55 pm (utc) on April 18, 2003]
IIS, ASP, and other Tips [xoc.net]
Just a quick question with regards to the comments made above about dynamic meta tags. This has really intrigued me so I've been having a bit of a look around.
Say I created 1 page (forget about templates for the moment) which used dynamic meta data content.
1. Would I be able to include dynamically created keywords?
2. Would the search engines read this page as numerous pages ie. if I had 100 rows of meta data in my database consisting of title, description and keyword, would the SE spider read this as 100 different indexable pages (thus negating the need for 100 seperate doorway pages)
Probably very basic questions, just tell me if I'm being a nuisance!
TIA
Please ignore question 1 from my last post!
