Dynamic Site and Keywords

Can dynamic pages be optimized for SE?

[lindavh]

I am not a programmer, and only know how to create a static web page with content, title, description, etc. for keywords on the page.

I have a few questions:

Can a database that generates dynamic pages in the website, be optimized for search engines with different keywords for each dynamic page?

If you have 300 different (products or reports), each needing keywords to reflect that particular product or report, that are in a database, how do you optimize for individual keyword search?

I am not a programmer, as you may have guessed, but I would like to know if this can be done successfully without having to write individual static page for each product.

Thank you for any suggestions. I read what I could find this forum, but some of it was way over my head in programming language, and basically I just need to know if this can be done and if so how, so I can work with a database programmer with optimization being a key concern. Are there explanations that I can give to the programmer how to acheive this (maybe articles on how this is done), provided it can be.

With many thanks,
Linda

[linkshark]

>300 different (products or reports), each needing keywords

You could add another field to the database-- "keywords".

>without having to write individual static page for each product

Then you could use something like webmerge with a good template to create your pages. With only 300 products it would not be hard to rerun it every so often for updates.

[too much information]

Sure you can do this, but the important part would be setting up the site so that the robots can find each version of the dynamically generated page. Basically a dynamically generated site map that would pull the links from the database itself so that it would update on it's own.

I did this for one of my sites and my dynamic content gets crawled throughly by Alexa, Teoma, and only slightly by Google. (I'm not concerned with the crawls for those pages, it isn't important to the site.)

Once you set up your dynamic site, creating a dynamic site map should be a piece of cake.

[netcommr]

yes.

basically take a template, for example

<title>[[TITLE]]</title>

<h1 class="heading">[[H1]]</h1>

etc...

then parse the template with a script to replace [[TITLE]], etc with the proper strings in the database. The urls pointing at the script will have a variable in them to tell the script what data chunk to put in the page to send back to the client

I am actually in the middle of writing a site manager with this built in. The urls for the site will look normal, such as /folder/file.ext then use a mod_rewrite to redirect to the script which uses the $ENV{'REQUEST_URI'} to get the variables 'folder' and 'file' to display the correct page. This keeps the address bar filled with an understandable format for users to read and save. Direct urls to the script will work fine as well, such as /script.cgi?folder=aaa&file=bbb, but those scare some users sometimes and I'm just "spider"aphobic as well.

[lindavh]

Thanks for all the information so far. I am sending this to my database programmer who at this time has never addressed the search engine spidering issue with any past projects.

To further our mutual discussions regarding the possibility or methodology of dynamically rendering keywords from a database, whereby the search spiders would be aware of such keywords for top listing purposes, I welcome any and all feedback, edits, suggestions or alternative strategies for achieving the same goal: organically top listing thousands of keywords.

If there is a sample site with this objective, please feel free to sticky me with the url.

Thank you so much for your input...someday I may able to answer this for another member, yeah?

Linda