Etips is a publication of:
Your Guide to Professional Web
Site Design and Development
Hello,
Welcome to this week's edition of Etips.
In this week's edition of Etips, I will be featuring part two of the article
series we began last week entitled, Optimizing Dynamic Pages, written
by Dale Goetsch.
If you missed part one, you can find it in the archive listed above.
I hope you'll enjoy this week's edition of Etips.
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 Optimizing Dynamic Pages
Part II: The Widget Queen Revisited
By
Dale
Goetsch
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
<a href="bluewidgets.html">blue widgets</a>
or the slight variation
<a href="bluewidgets.html"><img
src="bluewidget.gif"></a>
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
<a href="bluewidget-1.html">blue widgets style 1</a>
<a href="bluewidget-2.html">blue widgets style 2</a>
<a href="redwidget-1.html">red widgets style 1</a>
<a href="redwidget-2.html">red widgets style 2</a>
<a href="newwidget-1.html">new widgets style 1</a>
<a href="newwidget-2.html">new widgets style 2</a>
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:
<html>
<head>
<title>Blue Widgets style 1</title>
</head>
<body>
<!--#exec cgi="myscript.pl?bluewidget-1"-->
</body>
</html>
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+widgets
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&model=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
<a
href="http://www.mycompany.com/catalog.html?item=widget&color=blue&model=1">blue
widgets style 1</a>
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.
Copyright © 2003 Search Innovation Marketing. All Rights Reserved.
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. |
|
| Tip of
the Week |
 |
If you would like to spice
up your web site, you can add a nice mouseover navigational menu to the top
of each page. When you place your mouse over the main menu, a drop down menu
will appear. As you move your mouse over the drop down menu, each selection
is highlighted. Nice effect. You can find it
here.
Today's tip is an excerpt from the highly acclaimed
Web Design Mastery series.
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Nunley's Biz Tips |
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