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Optimizing dynamic pages (Part 1)
Dale Goetsch
Search Innovation
August 1, 2003
The Widget Queen
You are the Widget Queen. You eat, breathe, and live widgets. You sell
more widgets than anyone. You want to reach more widget customers, so
you have decided to sell widgets on the web. You have spared no expense
in designing and building the ultimate widget website. You have widget
descriptions; you have widget specifications; you even have widget movies.
The only thing your widget website does not have is visitors.
Off to the search engines you go. You type in the phrase "left-handed
blue widgets" and look at the results. All of your major competitors
are listed. There are even competitors you have never heard of. But you,
the Widget Queen, do not have a listing there.
What's up with that? What follows is some very basic introductory material
followed by some advanced technical details on dynamic sites and SEO.
What is a search engine?
First of all, you need to understand what a search engine actually searches.
When a potential visitor does a search in a search engine, such as Google
or AllTheWeb/FAST, she is not really searching the web; rather, she is
looking at a database compiled by that search engine. This database consists
of the text and links from the web pages that have been visited by the
search engine's robot.
How is a search engine database compiled?
Search engines compile these databases automatically using software programs
called "robots" or "spiders". These automatic programs
visit pages on the World Wide Web, much as humans visit web pages using
browsers, by starting at some arbitrary location and following links.
When a website owner "submits" a page to a search engine, in
most cases she is supplying the search engine's robot with a starting
point for their automatic journey. Starting in that location, the robot
then follows links and thus "discovers" other pages in your
website or visits other sites to which your site is linked. (This, by
the way, is how search engines can find individual pages or whole sites
that have never been submitted to them--if there is a link to one site
from another site, chances are good that eventually a search engine robot
is going to find that link and follow it.)
Even though robots visit pages like human visitors do, what they can
do with what they "see" is quite different. When a human visitor
uses a browser to view a web page, that visitor can read the text on the
page, look at images, play movies, listen to sounds, submit information
in forms, follow hyperlinks, and any number of other tasks. The human
visitor really interacts with the site. The search engine robot, on the
other hand, can only do a few of these things. It is this difference that
can keep your dynamic page from being included in the search engine database.
What does a robot do?
Search engine robots are very simple creatures. They can "read"
text, and they can follow links. That's it. Robots cannot view a Flash
movie, they cannot fill in a form, and they cannot click a "submit"
button. What that means is that no matter how much great information your
web page may contain, if a visitor has to select it from a list, or type
a password, or submit a form full of information to get there, no robot
will ever visit that page.
The origins of dynamic pages
Most dynamic web pages are generated in response to queries run against
databases. Behind your widget website there is a large database of widgets.
When a visitor comes to your site and looks for left-handed blue widgets,
it is this database that supplies the response. The database provides
that information to the visitor. Typically the visitor checks a box or
selects from a list or even types text onto the page and presses a "submit"
button. Once she jumps through those hoops, your visitor gets her page
full of left-handed blue widgets.
I can't see you
Unfortunately, when a search engine robot visits this page, it cannot
check that box, it cannot select from that list, and it cannot click the
"submit" button. Put simply, the robot cannot get to page of
widgets. If the robot can't get there, the page will not be included in
the search engine database. If it's not in the database, searchers cannot
find it.
So how do you get there?
So how do we attract other visitors to our dynamic page of left-handed
blue widgets? There must be some way to get there without having to click
on that "submit" button.
Next month we will look at several ways to get search engine robots to
visit dynamic web pages. Stay tuned.
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.
Copyright © 2002-2004 Search Innovation Marketing. http://www.searchinnovation.com
All Rights Reserved.
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