Advantages of dynamic websites

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I think it's time for a thread in this, Dynamic, section that is not so "negative". It dosen't always have to be about how to fix a problem. In my experience, dealing with dynamic websites and SEO, it dosen't have to always be a problem but rather and option. An option to build a website that is better optimized than any static website can ever be. The option to use the nature of the site being dynamic to create stuff the engines as well as the users love.

Let me give you a few examples of what I found:

- User and search engines like updated websites - websites that are kept fresh. It's much easier to keep a dynamic website fresh.

- Users and engines like websites with good internal linking and relevant cross linking. That too, is much easier with a dynamic website

- Users and engines like websites with few or no dead links. Again, this is usually easier to maintain with a dynamic website.

- Adjusting the keyword density on a dynamic (template based) website is much easier than on thousands of static pages.

What kind of cool things do you do with your dynamic website to make it more appealing to users as well as engines?

Personally, I find this topic a lot more exciting than dealing with indexing barriers :D

[David Wallace]

One cool thing we did with a dynamic web site recently is to have the programmer add unique title and meta description tags based on the topic of the page. This particular site has hundreds and hundreds of product pages so to go in and modify these elements on a one by one basis would take forever.

Rather we wrote a template title tag and a template meta description tag with "fill in the blanks" if you will and then she programmed so that those blanks would be filled in with the name or type of product that each page related to. Before this was done, every page had the same title and the same meta description tag.

Yes, there can definately be positive factors when working with dynamic sites.

One a side note, regarding the meta description tag, this was done before Yahoo released their own search engine and Inktomi still used the meta description tag for the description that appears in the SERPs.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Yes, dynamically created titles and META-tags are definately one good use of dynamic websites. Much faster than writing it all by hand.

If you need to communicate it to your programmers most of them will understand a syntax like this:

TITLE:
Buy [product-name] from my company at [product-price]

META DESCRIPTION:
Search for our large collection of [product-name] and other [product-.group] items online.

META KEYWORDS:
[product-name], [product-group], [5 most prominent words on the page]


Basically you just use [] as placeholders for variables you want included and then talk to your developers about the kind of content you want in each of them.

[Nick W]

Here's a few reasons off the top of me head:


RSS/Atom Feeds for the unitiated
User contributed content - Forums, comments, etc
Search and Replace for Typos or KW mistakes
No outdated source code, just change the templates
Customizable per user with templates
In fact, why on earth would a serious web-developer NOT use a dynamic solution these days? it aint 1996 dude.. LoL!


I find it quite inconceivable to write a static site anymore, the tools are there, there are no excuses about spiders prefering static sites if you have a system with good clean urls so why lumber yourself with anything less than a modern solution?

Nick

[pageoneresults]

What kind of cool things do you do with your dynamic website to make it more appealing to users as well as engines?
Great question and one that will surely raise a few eyebrows.

I've been working with rewriting dynamic URIs now for just over two years. I work strictly in a Windows environment where URI rewriting has not been as easy nor accessible as for those working in a UNIX/LINUX environment. We did a lot of research in the beginning and tested various products before settling with our current ISAPI Rewrite product.

If you have a database capable of generating 100,000 product pages, utilizing a URI rewrite is mandatory in today's site management. Without one, you are not taking advantage of the full capabilities of your database and web.

What we've been doing is creating semantically correct CSS driven templates along with a complete URI rewrite and the results have been incredible. We're populating various HTML elements throughout the page with dynamic content. We may have 10, 15 or even 20 different variables on a page. In most instances, we are able to develop complete pages working with just the variables.

What's really neat is opening up a web and seeing only a few pages and sub-directories. Then performing a site: search at the various SEs. ;) Here's a recent Case Study (no keyword specifics).

Original site online for five years. 6,700 pages indexed by Google. We consulted with the client, designer and programmer for approximately 12 hours on rewriting URIs and how to utilize the content in their database through the use of multiple variables in their templates. At the time of the rewrite, client was averaging 3 million page views per month.

Within 180 days, at one point Google had indexed up to 245,000 pages from their database which is capable of generating upwards of 500,000 pages. Page views soared to 10 million per month plus during that time period. I won't comment on ROI. ;)

One very important thing to keep in mind when performing URI rewrites; Planning and Development. You need to carefully plan your URI and directory structure. If you've got ten categories, you'll probably have 10 sub-directories...

www.example.com/category1/
www.example.com/category2/

If you have sub-categories you'll probably have...

www.example.com/category1/product1/
www.example.com/category2/product1/

One thing we discovered when rewriting URIs in a Windows environment is how the server reacts. Unfortunately if you are not careful, you may end up with spidered URIs that are junk. Absolute URIs in your httpd.ini are a must.

We always back our way out of a URI and test server header responses at each level to make sure everything is correct. You control all of this through the httpd.ini file which resides at the root of your web and is edited via Note Pad or other text editor. Be careful, you may be returning 200 status codes at points in the URI structure where there should be a 301 or 404.

I should also add that use of the robots.txt protocol is recommended. You need to manage the spidering activity on the site. Utilizing an ISAPI filter in IIS and mod_rewrite on UNIX/LINUX along with a well planned robots.txt file are two important components when marketing a dynamic site.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

> If you have a database capable of generating 100,000 product pages, utilizing a URI rewrite is mandatory in today's site management. Without one, you are not taking advantage of the full capabilities of your database and web.

That is, unless you build you dynamic website from the ground up to be search engine friendly. It's possible without URL-rewrite, as discussed in another thread here :)

But anyway, a really good case and example of how much you can achieve if done well.

[Nick W]

Yes, I cant imagine doing this with IIS server but under *nix if you have to build it yourself, I'd heartly recommend the following approach:

Use pseudo urls as discussed earlier rather then rewrite
Get hold of the Smarty template engine (http://smarty.php.net) from the PHP folks
Spend a day or two really learning it
Then enjoy all the benefits of clean urls and cached templates (easier on system, quicker for users/se's


Nick

[pageoneresults]

That is, unless you build you dynamic website from the ground up to be search engine friendly.
I wish that were always the case. But, 9 out of 10 times we are dealing with a third party product on the backend that wasn't SE friendly to begin with. It is much easier to spend an hour or so configuring the httpd.ini file than it is to try and rebuild the backend. ;)

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Yes, but this thread is more about the advantages (when they are there) - not the opposite :)

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Two things that I worked a lot with, dealing with dynamic sites, are: Navigation and freshness that both ties into some kind of keyword or subject database.

Each document on the site can be assigned to one or more keywords or subjects. Editors do that when they publish. When joining this information with the poublishing (or last edit) date you can extract updated lists of links to relevant pages to whatever subject (category) or keyword you chose.

If implemented well across the site this can lead to better internal linking between relevant pages (themes, if you like) and more updated (fresh!) pages (every time a page within a subject change all pages with references to that subject changes too).

In my experience this has resulted in faster indexing of new pages, deeper indexing of the sites, more pages being frequently crawled and not the least, more page views per user session (from what we learned users find the relevant cross linking inspirering and as a result click more around in each session)

[Nick W]

>>Yes, but this thread is more about the advantages

There is no such thing as a one sided coin though mikkel, p1results makes some very good points both about 3rd party backends and the dreaded IIS server...

What he ends up with (correct me if im wrong p1r...) is a dynamic site right? out of a pile of 3rd party seo poop hehe!

There is somthing big to be said about the benefits of using url rewrite but wherever possible I'd stick clear of it just for simplicities sake, with genuinely 'clean' urls you can creat a real site structure with a little more ease..

Nick

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I am just talking about this thread. I just get tired of talking about the problems all the time and wanted to dedicate this thread to all the advantages. I am sure we will have plenty of threads here with all the problems and frustrating issues. Plenty to pick from :)

[SeoCatfish]

Mikkel you are one of my favorite SES speakers. Nice job at SES Chicago and don't stop wearing your orange suit!

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Thank you :)