Database driven directory style website SEO question

[imakalic]

Hi guys,

I wonder if anyone could shed some light on this question. I'm building a new website directory/business brochure listing for a neiche market. It is mostly database driven at the moment. My main concern is that each *brochure* is like a mini website for a business, but at the moment they are accessed based on the ID that is passed to a php file. ie brochure.php?id=10 would display the brocure of the customer with id 10.
Im wondering would i be better off leaving it as is or instead outputting the HTML of each brochure.
thus each brocure would have a folder or something
ie www.blah.com/10/brochure.html thus providing me with more *static* webpages with links back to my main page.

Pretty much would it make any difference if i left it fully dynamic or if i created it so that the html files are written out.

Does this make sense? I have a feeling this would have been asked before but i had troubles using the search on the forums.

Anyway ill stop ranting. :D Any help would be greatly appreciated thanks.

[voasi]

Yes, removing the ID's and making the URLs more static "looking" in nature is going to help get your pages indexed correctly.

You might want to see if you can output the pages on a 3rd level, or subdomain - brochure10.yoursite.com ...might be easier for your clients to remember and will also be appeasing to the search engines.

[imakalic]

ah yes good point. Forgot about subdomains. Might use that instead.
I think i may scrap the whole brocure.php?id thing and automate the whole conversion process from a php website to a html one, and ill either go ahead with the subdomain idea or if thats not feasable then just chuck them into their own dirs.

thanks for your reply.

[brian.mark]

Another option would be using mod_rewrite or ISAPI_Rewrite. That would allow you to leave things as-is and have it a more static looking site. You could do away with the parameters in the URL's and just have them in the virtual directory structure somewhere.

Brian.