Optimizing Dynamic Pages - Part
I
Dale
Goetsch
Search Innovation
August 1, 2003
The
Widget Queen
You
are the Widget Queen. You eat, breathe, and live
widgets. You sell more widgets than anyone. You
want to reach more widget customers, so you have
decided to sell widgets on the web. You have spared
no expense in designing and building the ultimate
widget website. You have widget descriptions;
you have widget specifications; you even have
widget movies. The only thing your widget website
does not have is visitors.
Off
to the search engines you go. You type in the
phrase "left-handed blue widgets" and look at
the results. All of your major competitors are
listed. There are even competitors you have never
heard of. But you, the Widget Queen, do not have
a listing there.
What's
up with that? What follows is some very basic
introductory material followed by some advanced
technical details on dynamic sites and SEO.
What
is a search engine?
First
of all, you need to understand what a search engine
actually searches. When a potential visitor does
a search in a search engine, such as Google or
AllTheWeb/FAST, she is not really searching the
web; rather, she is looking at a database compiled
by that search engine. This database consists
of the text and links from the web pages that
have been visited by the search engine's robot.
How
is a search engine database compiled?
Search
engines compile these databases automatically
using software programs called "robots" or "spiders".
These automatic programs visit pages on the World
Wide Web, much as humans visit web pages using
browsers, by starting at some arbitrary location
and following links. When a website owner "submits"
a page to a search engine, in most cases she is
supplying the search engine's robot with a starting
point for their automatic journey. Starting in
that location, the robot then follows links and
thus "discovers" other pages in your website or
visits other sites to which your site is linked.
(This, by the way, is how search engines can find
individual pages or whole sites that have never
been submitted to them--if there is a link to
one site from another site, chances are good that
eventually a search engine robot is going to find
that link and follow it.)
Even
though robots visit pages like human visitors
do, what they can do with what they "see" is quite
different. When a human visitor uses a browser
to view a web page, that visitor can read the
text on the page, look at images, play movies,
listen to sounds, submit information in forms,
follow hyperlinks, and any number of other tasks.
The human visitor really interacts with the site.
The search engine robot, on the other hand, can
only do a few of these things. It is this difference
that can keep your dynamic page from being included
in the search engine database.
What
does a robot do?
Search
engine robots are very simple creatures. They
can "read" text, and they can follow links. That's
it. Robots cannot view a Flash movie, they cannot
fill in a form, and they cannot click a "submit"
button. What that means is that no matter how
much great information your web page may contain,
if a visitor has to select it from a list, or
type a password, or submit a form full of information
to get there, no robot will ever visit that page.
The
origins of dynamic pages
Most
dynamic web pages are generated in response to
queries run against databases. Behind your widget
website there is a large database of widgets.
When a visitor comes to your site and looks for
left-handed blue widgets, it is this database
that supplies the response. The database provides
that information to the visitor. Typically the
visitor checks a box or selects from a list or
even types text onto the page and presses a "submit"
button. Once she jumps through those hoops, your
visitor gets her page full of left-handed blue
widgets.
I
can't see you
Unfortunately,
when a search engine robot visits this page, it
cannot check that box, it cannot select from that
list, and it cannot click the "submit" button.
Put simply, the robot cannot get to page of widgets.
If the robot can't get there, the page will not
be included in the search engine database. If
it's not in the database, searchers cannot find
it.
So
how do you get there?
So
how do we attract other visitors to our dynamic
page of left-handed blue widgets? There must be
some way to get there without having to click on
that "submit" button.
Next
month we will look at several ways to get search
engine robots to visit dynamic web pages. Stay
tuned.
About the Author:
Dale Goetsch Technical Consultant for Search
Innovation Marketing , a Search Engine Promotion
company serving small businesses and non-profits.
He has over twelve years experience in software
development. Along with programming in Perl, JavaScript,
ASP and VB, he is a technical writer and editor,
with an emphasis on making technical subjects
accessible to non-technical readers.
Copyright © 2003 Search Innovation Marketing.
All Rights Reserved.
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