What Is The Best Way To Get Your Dynamic Web Site Optimized?

Darren Franks - August 22, 2008

How does one get their dynamic website optimized? The answer is more subjective than you would think. A dynamic web page is a web document that can be updated in real time and will display new content nearly every time the page is accessed. This can give the surfer a new experience with your site each time they visit and provide them a constant flow of new information. Obviously, this poses a problem for the search engines in that every time a new piece of content is added or subtracted from the page, it would make said page difficult to index. Consequently, there are many things to consider when strategizing for optimization of your dynamic website. Examples of the types of dynamic websites include: news sites, blogs, bulletin boards, ecommerce sites and any site that gives users the ability to upload new content.

Firstly, you could create static pages and optimize them in the normal fashion and submit those to the search engines in addition to the dynamic pages. These static pages would be linked to all of your dynamic pages. A site map would be the way to go here. You could also keep a paragraph or two static on a page and just make part of the page (news feeds) dynamic. There will also be a ton of issues with all those long, parameter rich URLs. If you do need to include parameters, limit it to two and limit the number of characters per parameter to ten or less. Also, if using an Apache web server, one could do a mod rewrite (have the server redirect the URL to an alias file) and make the URL more indexable for the search engines. There is also the issue of slow loading pages (which will not do wonders for the surfer experience!). You could combat this with something like page fragment caching which is used to generate part of the page before it is displayed, and then ASP is used to generate dynamic content when the page is requested. Essentially, this technique would speed up the server side, thus making the page load quicker for the user.

All in all, whether your site is a small ecommerce site, a blog or a gigantic site with loads of dynamic news feed pages, it is always intelligent to make sure it is optimized for search. Basically, the tools are there and you don’t have to worry about your site not being static anymore. If you have a good game plan in place and nice, simple URLs, you needn’t worry about the spiders ignoring your web page. The Internet and more specifically SEO are forever evolving.