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I have a small dynamic e-commerce site that I have been asked to promote however I'm having problems trying to nail down which solution would best suit.
The site contains approx 10 pages, selling approx 40 products online. Considering the limited number of pages I'm assuming XML trusted feeds are not the answer.
Also, it is apparent that standard SERP promotion would not work due to the dynamic url's.
PPC is one solution, however due to the limited values of the goods (£2-5) this would not prove cost effective.
Each page as an URL similar to the one below:
www.example.com/cgi-bin/filename.cgi?Wish=000B0050001A0000622CEBEA
Any ideas? Thanks for your time.
[edited by: pageoneresults at 12:34 am (utc) on Sep. 23, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified URI [/edit]
For a tiny site of this type, you might be better off creating static pages either to correspond to the dynamic pages (assuming they follow a category or theme breakdown) or even the products. Keyword-based static pages might work, too. If they change products often (making the static solution higher maintenance), you could create some static-appearing dynamic pages that would pull from the appropriate database. Or, if there are a small number of possible parameters, you could just rewrite static URLs to deliver the dynamic content.
Google et al are getting better at indexing dynamic pages, and one parameter isn't as bad as five, but the URLs still look unfriendly to users.
Mod-rewrite is used on apache servers and can be used to rewrite a url. It can make a URL look pretty much anyway that you desire. For more information, jump on over to the Apache Web Server forum. The people over there are great and willing to help answer any questions about it. There are also plenty of examples over there to learn from.
coho75
Considering the limited number of pages I'm assuming XML trusted feeds are not the answer.
The general guideline for an XML feed is about 500 pages. However, I have seen feeds with much smaller number of URLs. Depending on the reseller and the projected traffic, you may have to pay a monthly maintanince fee.
Your other option is to do Overture Site Match. This is aimed at sites such as you have described. But you still would have had to do the optimization on the page to get them to rank well.
The cost of having to pay upfront to get some of the deeper pages in may not provide good ROI. It does depend on how much traffic these pages would generate - i.e. if you pay $10.00 up front and $0.15 cents a click and only receive 100 clicks in a year, you have actually paid $25.00 for those 100 clicks, which is $0.25 per click. If you were to get 200 clicks you paid $0.20 per click. The more clicks, the cheaper the overall price gets. This is the "real" or actual cost of the click if you like.
Using goal seek in Excel, to get the real cost of the click to hit the CPC cost of $0.15, you need nearly 16,000 clicks.
Hope that helps!