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Elliot Jones on Search Engine Opitmisation, What to look for in dynamic sites

Written by: Elliot Jones

Article Overview: There’s no doubt that search engine optimisation is here to stay. Indeed, it has finally staked its claim in the mainstream marketing mix, after years of being doubted and misunderstood as a form on online marketing witchcraft. But how do things work when you want to search engine optimise a dynamic website? Read on to find out some of my pointers...

Elliot Jones on Search Engine Opitmisation, What to look for in dynamic sites

There’s no doubt that search engine optimisation is here to stay. Indeed, it has finally staked its claim in the mainstream marketing mix, after years of being doubted and misunderstood as a form on online marketing witchcraft.

And it can be a relatively easy and pain free experience, if you consider and plan it from the outset. Tie in a good search engine campaign with the initial concept and design of a new site and you’ll find it infinitely easier down the line than you would by creating a site and then looking at search engine optimisation retrospectively.

Think about it, you wouldn’t add the yeast to your bread after you’ve cooked it, so why do the same with your site? You’ll get far better results by adding the right ingredients at the right stage of the process, particularly if you’re working with complex, dynamically generated sites. This means, quite simply, talking to your developers before so much as a div tag has been conceived, and making sure the basics are laid out so you don’t have to go back and retrace (or redesign) your steps after you’ve had the site signed off and set live.

I’ve spoken to a huge number of company directors and marketeers about this, and consistently had similar feedback that their search engine optimisation work would have been far less complex or time consuming if they had tied it in at the development stage – something that is all too often given too little weight when talking about budgets, timeframes and proposals for search engine optimisation.

The rule should be to try to tie in and think about search engine optimisation strategising at the wireframe stage of your web design planning, and make sure development decisions and concepts are passed by a search engine optimisation consultant or specialist before committing.

Of course, it’s rarely that easy, and not every developer is going to have a search engine optimisation guru on tap to help ensure development moves in the right direction. So, in an attempt to get your proverbial bread rising better than Mr Warburton’s himself, I’ve outlined a few key issues I regularly come across with dynamic site design and search engine optimisation; and all in the hopes that you can get the basics right from the outset – which should mean money, and time, saving as well as some impressive upward movement in the search engine results pages.

First off, let’s look at duplicate content on dynamically generated pages. When you’re designing a dynamically generated page, all too often not enough of the page content changes from page to page. If only small areas of the content copy changes, the search engines will not identify an applicable variation between pages and defer to presuming that you’ve got pages upon pages of duplicate content. Remember, the first class of SEO 101 states that duplicate content is bad.

And it’s not just the body content that can fall foul of the duplication issue. Page title duplication can also be a search engine killer for a dynamically generated site, as so much weight is given to page titles in the search engine results pages. Search engines look at page title as a great indicator of the primary content of a given page, and this should always be structured with search engine opitmisation in mind.

Following on from the dynamic search engine optimisation issue of duplicate page titles, we should really mention duplicate meta descriptions. Setting a global or category level meta description might be an easy solution when creating your dynamic site, but overlooking the meta description can have a greater detrimental effect than you might have first thought. Search engines can penalise you for not giving them enough information, and your meta description will more often than not appear in the search engine results pages directly under your title tag. You need to make the most of, and exploit, this – think of it as a piece of Advertising copy – get keywords and unique call to action statements in there. If you’re in position two on Google and your competitor is in the top spot, you’ll be grateful you took the time to make your meta descriptions unique, particularly when you get more clicks than they do from results link.

Using auto-generation of pages is also one of those dynamic shortcuts that can result in bad search engine optimisation results. It’s great to have a database chock-full of information available at the click of a button, but when presenting that information on a page, it’s always worth putting in a little extra to make sure good quality content is there to back it up. Increasing the content will help search engines to differentiate between pages that would otherwise be dangerously similar, as well as increasing the keyword densities and synonymous longer-tailed keywords, helping the search engines to identify that the page is indeed valuable and worth ranking highly.

Moving away from simple content issues, hidden pages are also a huge hindrance to search rankings for dynamic sites. Pages and content behind form submissions or javascript postbacks simply cannot be found or crawled by search engine spiders, making any pages or content hidden in this way impossible to index. It’s a surprisingly common dilemma, and a number of dynamic website owners will be oblivious to the fact that large sections of their site are ‘hidden’ from the search engines. A common bug bear of search engine optimisation, and an example of how common this issue is comes form .NET – which by default will create postback links, rather than proper links – meaning large portions of the site will be hidden. In addition, it’s easy to lock off large areas of your site behind drop down sectors in forms, again denying the search engines the chance to find and index your content.

URLs and query strings can also drastically hinder your search engine optimisation friendliness, and complicated database sections which create deep levels of pages can often have seven or eight &id= type strings – not something search engine users really want to see!

In addition, null query strings appearing in every URL, but doing nothing, aren’t going to help your search engine optimisation much either. URL rewrites can help to rectify this, but bear the implications in mind when building your site initially. Further, integrating different ordered query strings when accessed throughout different places on the site can cause substantial duplicate content issues, and therefore a black mark in the eyes of the search engines.

Whilst we’re talking about query strings, if you’re going to use words in your query strings, make sure they fit in with your targeted keywords. This is a great argument to make sure that before you do ANYTHING, you do some initial keyword analysis to find out where your audience is going to come from and how many of them are out there.

Finally, make sure that when you build a dynamic site, wherever possible, make sure as much of the data (meta data, title tags etc) can be retrospectively edited. It might mean more work initially, but when you seriously want to take on the major competition in the search engine results pages, you’ll be grateful you don’t need to rip down the whole site and start again!

This is just a starter for ten on what to look for, but it illustrates my point I think, that if you plan, structure and research what you are hoping to achieve, having a dynamic site doesn’t need to be a hindrance, but forgetting to put the yeast in your bread mix will always leave it distinctly flat.

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Article Tags: company directors, development decisions, development moves, development stage, div tag, free experience, initial concept, mainstream marketing, marketeers, marketing mix, no doubt, outset, right direction, right stage, search engine campaign, search engine optimisation, time consuming, timeframes, witchcraft, yeast



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