Dbase Driven Sites versus SE Optimisation

[leenoble]

Hoping you can all help! I currently administer our company website http://www.shop-equip.com and will be looking at re-vamping the whole site. We currently have approx 1,100 products available to buy online over approx 340 pages.

We will be looking at a fresh content management system and possibly using dreamweaver for page creation but I am little concerned on how this might affect our page rankings and search engine results.

Currently, we manage our product information through include files and using SSI which allows us flexibility in updating product information and also allows us to have static pages that have optimised keywords, descriptions etc but I am concerned about how to optimise product groups.

If anybody could offer any thoughts, advice and suggestions as to how optimisation is managed and also as to which software would be recommended, I would really appreciate it.

[le_gber]

Hello Lee,

I would suggest you to read this thread to learn what are the key points that search engine look at: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=7578, I think that there is some improvement that can still be made: better meta use, better titles, use of H tags and putting css and js in a separate file for a start.

As for the stock/product management system you can either go for a back end database driven site (asp/php/mysql) or using a cms software like macromedia contribute to administer page content.

One thing I would add, is that you should use a site map to help robots find the new pages if you change the page name. Also consider using 301 permanent redirects.

Hope this helps.

Leo

[leenoble]

Hi Leo,

Thanks for your response... Am i right in thinking that database driven sites do not rank well on search engines for specific products?

For example, amongst other things we sell electronic flykillers. If you search for this on google, we rank quite well because of the metatags and descriptions. What I'm concerned about is if visitors are searching for specific items through the major search engines, how would our products be spidered...

Any tips, tricks, advice and experiences that others may have had would be great!

[le_gber]

Hi Lee,

For this particular keyword and using the link I gave you in my first post your should be first (there is only 94 pages in the search result). Google don't use meta tags to rank a page so this position is due to page content and not meta optimisation.

Regarding the fact that SE don't like dynamic sites you have many option open:

First if you don't use session id's (which you don't need to except to track how customers behave on your site) everything should be fine as long as you keep the numbers of variables up to 2 - ie www.mydomain.co.uk/products.php?category=flykilles&subcategory=electronic. Don't use ID= because Google don't like that very much.

Then you could use a server mod_rewrite to rewrite the URL as if they were static so the above url would become www.mydomain.co.uk/flykilles/electronic.htm or php or anything similar.

Finally by using a sitemap you would help robots to list your pages.

Hope this helps

Leo

[actionjackson]

Hi Guys,

I have a DB driven site with many 000 "pages". Its a DVD site with each DVD having its own page dynamically generated upon request... E.G www.mydvd.com/showtitle.php?title=11111

I understand how to use mod_rewrite to create a more search engine friendly URL, but what do i do about a site map?

Do i have a site map with every title linked??? do i just have a selection of titles?? How can i get the search engines to index every page on my system? (thus meaning i should rank well on lesser known titles)

Thanks

AJ

[jackson992]

action:

This is something I have just started doing. On my sitemap I have it organized by ProductName. The thing I need help is limiting the results to so many a page

[actionjackson]

Surely having 00's or 000's of links to products cant do much for the PR of that page. or am i wrong?

[jackson992]

How do you have your database pages titled? Mine are titled by product name

Could someone show me how to do the server _mod_rewrite? I would love to make my urls more search engine friendly