| Most of the E-commerce sites on the Net are based on content management systems, this means: URLs and pages are dynamically generated by the scripting language fetching all elements from the database. It is very complicated to optimize such a site and it requires normally 100% professional assistance. I will show you, how you can resolve a problematic case like this on hand of the below information provided for your search engine optimization project. Optimization for ASP Sites completely dynamically generated means: all the displayed data such as navigation, all content, products, page titles and Meta tags are fetched by the ASP queries from the different fields in the tables of a database and then parsed by the engine onto the users screen through a browser. Fact is that search engine can only understand as much of this code as a person who has a good knowledge of html but has no clue of JavaScript, DHTML or scripting languages such as ASP or JSP. This person is probably not capable to write any queries to search the database and to display the results such as the content for a certain page on the screen. Search Engines can't either. First requirement in a case like this is to retrieve the ranking status of the website in question at search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. If the web site does not show up at all (below the first 50 pages) be not discouraged, there are ways to actually improve ranking. There are factors which should be clarified, check if there are any duplicate content titles and Meta tags. This is very often the case at dynamically generated web sites. This has a bad impact on the ranking, when repeated data is dished up to the bots. The head tags <head> here comes title and Meta data </head> are mostly generated by the use of an include file. Take care that as many pages as possible have its own and unique title tag and Meta data such as the description etc. Improving this will take you already further than you probably expected. Duplicate content mostly found on product pages often without product related small articles, reflecting the keywords users probably will use searching for this product is also a draw back of dynamically generated web sites. In fact this is a common problem with most Ecommerce websites. How to start? Thus implementing the titles and Meta data plus content has absolute priority. Second is to wait a short couple of days to see the result after the spiders have indexed the new content. Mostly this first step pulls the web site over the 50 – 45 page rank. To analyze the behavior and reaction of the search engines to their new treat is essential to take the second step, which would be adding additional keywords to every page and format your content properly using headers (<h1>) and <h2> etc. Assigning a hierarchic order to the content seems to have a very good effect on the ranking especially MSN and Yahoo search engine show mostly a significant increase in ranking. The first ranking results Do not be surprised when your site is ranking now in Yahoo at the third page and on the first page of MSN with some very competitive keywords, but you will realize that Google seems to be more resistant to present your site to the users searching the Net. It is therefore absolutely necessary to monitor the effects of your changes closely and daily to achieve a better result and to analyze all responses of the search engines. It can even happen that your site shows up in MSN and it can disappear after a day or three again which can be really shocking because you have invested a lot of time and probably have sacrificed even your weekends to achieve better ranking results. Get into the code and check what is going on. Make sure that the code of the templates is clean XHTML and replace too many complicated nested tables with a more simple code and additionally clear everything out that can be handled by the Stylesheet. Best way is working following W3C recommendations and you will see this will improve ranking too. Rewrite the content and double check if there is no more duplicate content or Meta tags around. Penalized When your research shows that the site was probably penalized because the search engines have crawled URLS which offer the same content and products on different pages and that there is no way for you to resolve this because this is the way the site was set up then proceed with the following: Add a robots.txt file and place it into the root of the server so the crawler is not allowed to follow the URLS with a query string (?). This looks something like this: Disallow: /*? This really helps, just try it. Crawler-delay: If you suspect that the spiders and bots avoid crawling the complete site because the site was build with hundreds of include files (server side includes) and this requires excessive time to load when the crawler comes to visit your server then additionally add a crawler delay to the robots.txt so that MSNbot will crawl the server more slowly (User-agent: msnbotCrawl-delay: 120) (User-agent: Teoma Crawl-delay: 10) (User-agent: Slurp Crawl-delay: 10) just to name a few. This also really helps if your site gets spidered too quickly, especially if you're using ASP. End results You will see that complicated dynamically generated sites will rank very well and will hit the first 3 pages of Google, Yahoo and MSN in a timeframe of approximately 4 - 6 months after implementing the changes described above. Please notice that you have to be patient when it comes to search engine optimization. Normally optimization can take from 4 up to 12 months, depending how competitive your keywords are and how much content you have to offer. Building static pages with good written content always helps and is recommended. Remember to monitor the reactions of the search engines to your changes and act accordingly. To achieve a good position, you may have already guessed, many factors are involved. It starts how the website is built and includes the content you offer and goes on to how accessible your navigation is to the search engines and how easy they can follow it. Also know that spiders hate queries because they can be caught up by these queries as spiders in a web and this is the plain truth even when it sounds like a fairy tale. |
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