Tuesday, July 29, 2008

SEO of Dynamic Pages

Here are some things to keep in mind when optimizing dynamic pages:
  1. Dynamic URLs are definitely search engine friendly.
  2. If possible specify the title tag. Or use a CMS which has this option. Title tag is the most important on-page SEO factor. Most CMS's use the site name as the default title tag. The worst ones use it as the title for all pages, less worse ones use it in the form " ". Ideally, you want the page title first. And make sure that the title of that content page is well optimized for the keywords you're trying to target.
  3. Specify meta tags. This is not so important for SEO, but can make a difference to your click-throughs from the SERPs (search engine results pages) - particularly the meta description. Ideally, you can specify the content for the meta description when you're creating content. Same goes for the meta keywords, but this is very minor. Major search engines don't really care anymore.
  4. Proper use of heading tags. Make sure that you use h1 tag for the page heading, and use subheadings (h2 tag, etc) for sub-headers in the content. These are relatively well weighted SEO factors. If you're using a WYSIWYG editor in the CMS, make sure that it uses tags as opposed to just changing the font size.
  5. Clean code. I've seen so many dynamic sites that are messily coded. Ideally, the outputted HTML code is as clean as possible and the actual content appears relatively close to the top of the HTML. Using CSS-based, non-table layouts will make a difference here as well.
  6. With regards to listing all the dynamic links on a static page, that's not really necessary, though it's a still a good idea to have a sitemap - both HTML and XML.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good read. But, you missed one point about the special characters in the url. Most of the dynamic pages still include special characters like the 'brackets' or '@'. Such urls are difficult to crawl by bots. Use of '?' in the url is ok. But, I feel other characters are not that SE friendly.

Cheers!!

Aashish Malve said...

You are right. Thanks.