Dynamic Pages - Are they killing your site? - 1/31/2005
Many sites, especially store-fronts with a large number of products, rely on dynamically generated pages to implement their online stores. As we’ll see, these sites often do not realize their full potential, but with a little bit of work, they certainly could.
The typical scenario for dynamic pages is one in which a lot of time and energy has been spent developing an all encompassing database of products, and a website will read from the database in real-time, generating pages for products that consumers are looking for.
This may seem great for a store at first, as its products, descriptions, and prices are all centrally located. However, it's not ideal for search engines, and all too often search engines cannot find any of these product pages. So despite the store having invested huge amounts of time and money into creating a streamlined, elegant database-driven site with tons of content, none of their potential customers can find their products easily.
Dynamic sites need not fall into this typical scenario, and can often out-perform static sites if they are engineered with Search Engine Optimization in mind. Keep in mind that sites like these have a huge amount of potential content for search engines to find, if the site is constructed properly. Each product, even each product option (color, size, etc) is a potential page to be found by users and search engines. If a dynamic site is created properly, its search engine surface area can be immense, while individual pages within the site can be incredibly specific.
So how can a dynamically created site be optimized for search engines? Well, let's try to understand why search engines can't index most dynamic pages. Search engines typically 'spider' your site, a technique in which a page is found on your site, and then each link from that page is followed. Along the way, the spider takes not of what is on the page, indexes it, and continues on to more pages that you have linked to. However, in dynamically created sites, the links don't always work like this. For example, many sites implement a template product detail page such as ProductDetail.asp, and regardless of which product you are viewing, you are still looking at ProductDetail.asp. So, despite having thousands of products in their database, this site has only one product page. In order to view each individual product, additional information must be included in the link, such as ProductDetail.asp?ProductID=1. In this example, the product detail page will get the information for ProductID #1 and display it. Most search engines now have the capability of following such links, but how does the search engine know what to include after the "?"? The search engine isn't about to attempt the millions of possible combinations that could be added to this link. Instead, it simply spiders ProductDetail.asp, which is many cases will result in some sort of error message stating that the product could not be found.
The real trick here, as with most search engine optimization techniques, is to give the search engine an exact road map to follow. Full product directories are one way of going about this, and every dynamic site should at the bare minimum include one. Ideally, the product directory page includes every product that the site sells, and is updated constantly to reflect any changes to the product offerings. In addition, even today’s advanced search engines have difficulty following links that are extremely long. Therefore, a dynamic site should be built with the knowledge that long and complicated links will not be indexed.
For great results, however, more strategies should be implemented aside from the simple product catalog. One such strategy is cross-linking or cross-selling, in which links to similar pages/products on a site are presented. While the obvious benefit to this strategy is helping the user find similar products, there are additional benefits. It is widely accepted that search engines are getting more intelligent. One of their latest techniques is to intelligently weigh the value of different links to a site based on many things, one of them being theme. Following this logic, a particular page will rank higher if all of the incoming links are of a similar theme. Therefore, dynamic sites have the advantage of continually linking similar pages together (as in the cross-selling example). This linking strategy builds stronger themes than if each page were completely independent of it’s similar pages on the site. Developing sites that automate this linking is not a simple process, but is definitely worthwhile from both a usability and search engine optimization perspective.
So, as we’ve seen, with a bit of effort, dynamic sites can not only be completely indexed by search engines, but can be optimized to out-perform their static counterparts.
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About the Author: Netensify is an extremely effective internet marketing firm that works tirelessly to increase market share and profits for it's clients. Unlike most marketing firms, Netensify's staff have in-depth knowledge of all of the technical aspects of search engines, web site development, and marketing technologies, allowing them to deliver outstanding results.
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