Saturday, August 9, 2008

The SEO Mistakes Made on Database Driven Websites (Part 2)

5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or Javascript post backs that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realized. For instance .NET creates post back links by default instead of proper links - potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.

6. Too many query strings - this is a common bugbear of the professional SEO, where complicated database selections create deep levels of pages, but with seven or eight &id= type strings. Additionally, some bad development methodology can leave pages with null query strings that appear in every URL but do not do anything. The answer to this is generally URL rewrites, creating much more search engine friendly and user-friendly URLs!

7. Putting query strings in different orders when accessed through different places - this can create duplicate content issues, which can cause major penalties.

8. Not using user language to generate automated pages - if you are going to create a database driven website that uses words in the query strings make sure that you use words that will help you with SEO - if you sell widgets, make sure you are using the word widgets somewhere in the URL instead of just product= or id= - keyword research can assist with this.

9. Not allowing the meta data and title to be edited easily after the site build. It is possible to hard code the generation of meta information into a database that does not allow it to be edited later. Creating a mechanism for modifying this information initially helps everyone at a later stage when the information needs changing without shoehorning it into an already developed structure.

10. Creating keyword stuffed pages by using auto-generation. Search engines quite liked pages with high densities of your keywords, but now these are likely to get you marked down rather than up. So be aware when creating pages that long pages with lots of your products on can create too high a density. For instance listing blue widgets, light blue widgets, navy blue widgets, sky blue widgets is going to create a page with a very dense page for the phrase "blue widgets".

These are just 10 of the most common potential optimization pitfalls when creating dynamic websites. There are many more facets to producing a great database driven site, including user friendliness, speed, performance and security, but they all add together to make the best solution to your needs.

Source from EntireWeb Newsletter

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