Search Engine Optimisation for Dynamic Sites
In order to optimise a small site the diligent SEO must pay attention to many issues both on and off page. Whilst this is a reasonably specialised skill its not rocket science. SEO is not a black box of tricks and spells, its really quite simple stuff, and most people who read a lot will easily pick up the basics. So why is it some of us are more highly regarded, dare I say it more highly paid? Personally I think one area that takes a lot of experience is the ability to optimize and get high rankings in Dynamic sites.
When optimizing a dynamic site the skills and mind set of the SEO needs to be completely different. One trick that I have learnt is that it really helps to put your self in the shoes of the user. To elaborate, what I mean is that it helps to think about your site, the data in it and how your user is going to find what they are looking for. One example I had recently was health care products, medical creams, potions and lotions. You know the sort of thing.
Essentially the obvious way to optimise for a site like this is to look at what you are selling and communicate and extol the values of these products. As long as you get your architecture correct, your URL’s indexing well, and you back links firing in then you should have few problems.
It is however the authors belief that there is a lot to gain from asking the question, what are my users going to search for? Okay so, health care products are usually purchased to treat and ailment of some kind. One good way to go about this then is to create a lot of content rich pages which funnel through and effectively make a sales pitch towards the actual product. Some people refer to these pages as doorway pages which is not really fair. If you put some amount of effect in to the page in terms of its content then it’s a valuable resource for the customer and also puts them in the mind set to purchase.
Dynamic sites are not always easy to rank in the top 5 due to the sheer number of pages that exist with chopped up URL’s / parameters rewritten to something effective. This is not always the case but quite often there will be a site where the whole content base totally focuses on one of the items in your database. The internet is growing and this is becoming more common.
Don’t worry though, when it comes to dynamic you are looking at driving volumes, pushing diversity in the key phrase base! And the authors number 1 tip, think about what your user would search for and write pages which cover the key phrases and topics of that mind set.
