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Optimizing_Dynamic_Pages_ _Part_II
| Optimizing Dynamic Pages - Part II
Optimizing Dynamic Pages - Part II
The Widget Queen Revisited You have the world's finest
collection of widgets. You created the world's best widget
website. You have no traffic.
You checked in the search engines and find that your site does
not appear at all, even though all your competitors' sites do.
Perhaps the search engine robots cannot get to your pages to
index them.
Search Engine Robots Search engine robots are simple creatures.
They can "read" text to add to their databases, and they can
follow "normal" links--those links that are coded to look like
blue widgets
or the slight variation
That's it. Search engine robots cannot select items from lists;
search engine robots cannot type text into boxes; search engine
robots cannot click "submit" buttons. That means that no matter
how important our dynamically-generated page of blue widgets is,
if the only way to access that page is to select it from a list
or click on a button, the robot will never be able to visit it.
That, in turn, means that it will never appear in the search
engine results.
So how do you get your dynamic information to show up in
non-dynamic ways?
The Painful Solution One of the reasons that dynamic pages exist
is because of the difficulty involved in constantly updating --
adding and deleting -- pages from your site, based on which
widgets you are offering this season. If you have a separate
page for each make and model of widget, each of those pages can
be spidered. They can all be reached through links that look like
blue widgets style 1 blue widgets style 2 red widgets style 1 red widgets style 2 new widgets style 1 new widgets style 2
The bad news here, of course, is that you now have to create all
of those pages. This loses the benefit of drawing the widget
information from a database.
A Better Solution A better solution is to create only a "shell"
of each page, and then to dynamically populate the page from our
database. By creating a "real" file, you can assign a fixed URL,
but still use the database to fill-in the page, using any of
various server-side techniques (HTML server-side includes, Perl,
Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, PHP, etc.). A simple
page like this might suffice:
Blue Widgets style 1< itle>
Save this page as "bluewidget-1.html" and you're good to go,
assuming that "myscript.pl" will actually return the content you
want for the body of the page. True, you will have a discrete
page for each item in your inventory, but at least you only need
to hard-code the bare-bones of that page.
Another Way To Go There is yet another way to go. This method
does not require creating dozens of static pages, or of having
to include exotic scripts in your web pages. It also may not
work for all search engines!
Some search engine robots just will not follow links that
include a "querystring" as part of the URL. You have seen a
querystring if you have ever looked at the URL of a page of
search results in Google. For example, if you look for "blue
widgets" on Google, not only do you get page after page of blue
widgets, you also see that these pages have very
complicated-looking addresses
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=blue+w
idgets
In this address, everything after the question mark ("?") is a
querystring. This is used to pass additional information to the
web server. While some search engines can follow a complicated
address like this, many simply will not follow such a link. That
means that if you use a URL like
http://www.mycompany.com/catalog.html?item=widget&color=blue&mode
l=1
that the robot may not be able to follow it. This is bad.
On the other hand, an increasing number of search engine robots
will follow such links. Usually, links like this are created "on
the fly" by filling-out forms and clicking a "submit" button,
but that doesn't have to be the case. You can grab that address,
querystring and all, and put it into a "normal" link, like this
blue widgets style 1
Put several of these on a page and the search engine robot can
now visit your dynamic pages from links that require no
button-clicking. Remember that not all robots will follow these
links, so your mileage may vary.
As long as the link to the page exists in a form that does not
require human intervention to get to it (pulldown menus, search
results, form submits, etc) then a bot will follow it.
Widgets Out The Door Using any of these methods will help search
engine robots to find the dynamic pages on your site. This means
that the important content on those pages is more likely to be
included in the search engine databases, and that people will be
better able to find you. That, of course, means that the Widget
Queen will reign supreme, knowing that widget customers the
world over will now be able to find you and buy your widgets.
# # #
Dale Goetsch is the Technical Consultant for Search Innovation
Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine
Promotion company serving small businesses and non-profits. He
has over twelve years experience in software development. Along
with programming in Perl, JavaScript, ASP and VB, he is a
technical writer and editor, with an emphasis on making
technical subjects accessible to non-technical readers.
Copyright © 2003 Search Innovation Marketing. All Rights
Reserved.
Permission to reprint this article is granted as long as all
text above this line is included in its entirety. We would also
appreciate your notifying us when you reprint it: please send a
note to reprint@searchinnovation.com.
About the author:
Dale Goetsch is the Technical Consultant for Search Innovation
Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine
Promotion company serving small businesses and non-profits. He
has over twelve years experience in software development. Along
with programming in Perl, JavaScript, ASP and VB, he is a
technical writer and editor, with an emphasis on making
technical subjects accessible to non-technical readers.
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