4 replies to this topic

[rmartin929]

Sirs,

We have a retail board game. On the Q/A cards they have a number. This number when entered at our website takes them to external link(s) for more information or for other helpful resources. It's a way of adding value to the board game and entertainment.

So we have Excel spreadsheet with all the Q/A from the game cards, and all the external links to our Q/A sources. This database has a lot of great SEO content regarding our product, Q/A content of the game, and our sources (links).

What would be the best way to make this data (it's about 600Kb in Excel files) available to the search engines?

I'm assuming we could put it right into the code for the web page as a "table". However, is it then available to be viewed (view source)? The Q/A is pretty much our only Intellectual Property on the game. However, I would not let fear of someone stealing our ideas deter me from getting a higher search ratings.

You can be technical in your response, but please be detailed.

Thanks a bunch for your time and consideration,

Randy

[MaKa]

The only way to give search engines access to the information in your DB is to make the information available to view online. You could create a type of Q/A sitemap for all the entries and link to pages showing the content. You'd have to make sure that your Q/A sitemap is linked from your site and it will be spidered by search engines. You will need to make sure that the content shown is in HTML rather than an Excel sheet for best results.

[piskie]

You could consider importing the Spredsheet/s into a MYSQL database and pull from it using a search query system to present the results on-page.

[1dmf]

or use server side coding which can use excel files.

PERL has an Excel module i beleive and i'm sure ASP & PHP can directly use excel files also.

Don't forget, Excel is meerly a posh CSV file (Comma Separated Values) , you can also force excel to 'Save As' CSV , to ensure there is nothing other than CSV data.

You may even be able to run some conversion module / plugin / active-x component etc. to convert the excel to XML and use it that way.

There are many ways of skinning this particular cat, it's really down to your expertise in server side coding and the available server side language.

[rmartin929]

Thanks all for the responses. As one member said many ways to skin the cat and i think that mainly involves how that database is formatted Excel, CSV, SQL etc. and that's not totally important to me since most formats will allow a basic query and retrieval - and subsequent action.

I think Maka hit it in the nose. In order for the data to be used by SEO spiders it must viewable and in HTML format.

So maybe I do the following:

1. We have a main page for Q/A functionality - This is where the user enters Q/A number, this searches a datatbase and takes them to an appropriate link.

2. We have some page buried somewhere that links to a Q/A sitemap page. This is simply a HTML listing of all Q/A links. Maybe we could scrample this page so questions/answers/links are not aligned. This page is for SEO only and the reason i am saying scramble the order is to prevent a competitor from having a simple/easy way of stealing our content - unfortunately this sort of thing is fairly frequent in the toy/game world - actually probably common in all industries.

I'm not a coder (use to be in the days of Assembler and Cobal ),but am i on the right track?

I really the appreciate the responses - thanks!