SEO Tips for Dynamic Websites

* This post was updated on September 17th, 2009 *

First let’s take a moment to discuss dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are representative of pages with content that changes depending on the variables appended to the end of the URL. With the widespread use of content management systems and web applications, dynamic URLs are very common. A dynamic URL usually has a ? after the page extension .php or .aspx, etc. and is followed by a number of name value pairs that are separated by &.  So you’ll see URLs like this http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?name=value&name2=value2

Now onto the tips for dynamic websites.

1. Make all URLs search engine friendly. Though search engine spiders have become adept at indexing dynamic websites, dynamic websites and their URLs can pose obstacles to being indexed.For example:

   Many sites use sessions to gather and maintain information about a user and display different content to a user based on that session.  So when a search engine tries to crawl a page with a session ID is gets an error instead of relevant content.

   Covario recommends using cookies to handle session IDs and other session-based data currently passed in the URL.  Additionally we recommend using URL aliasing on sites with dynamic URLs.  URL aliasing is the practice of rewriting the URL to be human readable so users don’t have to see those ugly URLs.  Most content management systems already support this, however if yours doesn’t you can use mod rewrites for Apache servers and ISAPI filters for Windows Servers.

   For example:

   Existing URL: http://www.domain.com/seo/tips/dynamically?websites=1&site=123456&site2=2

   Recommended Rewrite: http://www.domain.com/seo-tips-for-dynamic-websitesc-websites

2. Integrate SEO basics into dynamic templates. Once each page incorporates its own URL, make sure your h1, title tag and description tag can be either dynamically generated or manually created for these pages.A practice that makes optimizing dynamic pages a little simpler involves taking the chosen h1 tag and automatically populating it for each page’s title tag and description tag. You’ll need to create some generic content for the description tag to ensure the insertion leaves the description tag unique and readable.By creating the dynamic template in this format, you automatically optimize the template for SEO basics. Then as long as you perform keyword research to discover which phrase is appropriate for each page, new dynamic pages will automatically be optimized for this best practice.
   

   *Tip: when generating dynamic pages for products or services, remember other on page factors can be tweaked to better support your targeted key phrases. Some of these on page factors include page specific image alt-tags, breadcrumbs, quote buttons, buy buttons and call-to-action paragraphs, plus more (e.g. use your h1, product name, product code, product type, house address, job location, etc. to fill in these dynamically pulled objects).

   Now you’ve got dynamic pages that have unique URLs, unique title tags, unique h1 tags and unique description tags.

3. Clean up your HTML code. Clean up the code within your templates. If you’re not using CSS files, off loading your Javascript in a .js file and putting your div tags below your content then you’re not taking full advantage of the SEO benefits for your dynamic templates.Remember, the higher your content and keywords are on your dynamically driven pages, the stronger and more relevant that content is to search engines.

Hope this helps to solve some dynamic template optimization challenges. If you’ve got more suggestions for how to better optimize dynamic websites – don’t hold back, share your ideas, share your thoughts and share your successes and failures.

My grandpa always use to say, “Two heads are better than one, unless they’re on the same body.” Funny old man Enjoy and have an awesome Labor Day Weekend.

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