2 replies to this topic

[wsiebler]

Hi All,

I have been optimizing sites for colleagues for a while but not done any dynamic sites. Now I have several sites that are dynamic PHP or CFM sites and am lost as to how to edit the pages.

Can anyone point me to some good resources or offer some tips to help. Link building is no problem it is just knowing how the change the on page factors that is confusing me.

Thanks for any input you can offer.

[Jill]

Welcome wsiebler!

Try the Dynamically Generated Site Issues forum here (where I moved this thread to). You'll find tons of useful tips.

Good luck!

Jill

[Randy]

Welcome wsiebler !

Optimizing dynamic sites isn't really a lot different than doing it with static sites. The main things to watch out for:

• Make sure Cookies are not being Required. If you can view the site with Cookies disabled and get normal urls that's a good sign.
• Make sure Session IDs are not being Required. Again, if you can surf the site with cookies disabled, see the real pages and not get a url with a lot of gobbly-gook in the url you're good.

Note that you can use both Cookies and Session IDs, but you can't Require them to view the site if you want the spiders to crawl everything properly. Requesting either or both is okay. Requiring them is another story.

Other than that, try to make sure the site doesn't have too many variables in the URL string for any pages you want to be spidered. The search engines are getting much better at multiple variable URLs these days, however I still recommend trying to keep those to two or maybe three tops. e.g. yourdomain.com/page.php?variable1=xx&variable2=yy The variables are everything after the question mark, and are usually separated by an ampersand character. The example has two variables.

As to the construct of the page, many times with dynamic sites the head and foot of the code that makes up the page may be Included from a base file. If that's the case with your sites you'll want to make sure those files are allowing you to customize the contents of the page Title, etc just like normal.

It's not that hard to do with a variable or two, but it kind of depends upon the site. You may be able to pull it from a database, or you may simple need to set a couple of variables to use to write that text.

In the end, a dynamic site delivers plain old HTML to the browser/spider. The only difference is that it gets the information from somewhere other than the .html file.