2 replies to this topic

[firedog]

Hi Everyone-

I've been lurking here for a while, but this is my first post.

I run a small SEO business and recently have had several potential clients with database driven web sites turn to me for help.

These are sites with generated pages and have 2 big problems in terms of SEO:
1) stop characters in all the URL's

2) generated pages that are totally"virtual" - there isn't a page for me to go to that I can optimize, not even one with asp calls and the like. Often these pages are the specific product pages that would be the best candidates for optimization of specific targeted keywords, but the site is database driven, either for the convenience of the technical staff, or in order to provide the site owner with "user updateable" pages.

How do those of you reading this deal with such clients?

Problem #1 I have often solved, at least partially, by convincing them to rename some of the main pages of the site with SE friendly URL's. At least this way the SE's find many of the main and inner pages of the sites.

Problem #2 is a more difficult one: There is often a lot of resistance from the Webmaster or programmer who says that changes in the database setup or callup of the pages is "impossible". I know that this isn't really true, but it may be very difficult or expensive for a company that just invested heavily in a programming based site.

Any advice you can give me on how to deal with these clients, not lose their business, and manage to optimize their sites.

Thanks for any insight you can give me.

Danny

[Mel]

HI Firedog and welcome to the forums
This is getting to be more and more of a problem IMO, but there are a few problem areas that need to be addressed seperately:

Getting unique keyword rich page titles and descriptions.
Ability to change the page content without being a programmer.
If the site is on an IIS server, making sure that the server is caching the pages properly and is responding to if modified since queries by search engines in the right way.

There are a number of content management systems that will allow you to do more or less WYSIWYG changes to the visible pages, and IMO it should be the responsibiity of the developer to insure that the customer has access to such a system so that they can make changes without paying the programmers again.

But the problem of getting unique page titles etc seems to be beyond the capability of most CMS and it seems that you will have to battle with your web hosts and/or developers to get the last modified header set up right.

[mopacfan]

firedog,

I just responded to a very similar thread. If you're using asp, take a look: another thread

I think it will be very helpful.

Regards