With technological advancement, web 2.0 web applications are being developed every day and static websites are no longer just simply static, they are either migrated to dynamic websites using PHP, ASP, JSP and other programming languages to provide customized contents to users and also rich interaction or static websites are made more interactive by adding elements like flash banners to impart very interactive look to your website. These dynamic websites have provided user interaction by providing interface for users, eBay online auction store, Amazon book store; Yahoo stores are live examples which let users do real time shopping by creating accounts online, place orders, check their account status and swipe cards for payment – everything is secure online. Ecommerce storefront development, portal development, b2b osCommerce development have mobilized are life and making everything possible over internet.
Now coming to these dynamic websites visibility, these web sites should be search engine friendly but it is really difficult to make these dynamic websites search engine friendly.
What led to need of creating dynamic websites??
With growing need to sell products and services online for global reach and visibility in very short span of time websites are developed and internet proved the best tool for promotion of your business. Selling services through static websites is not a hard nut to crack but coming to selling thousands of products online developers started finding difficulty. Dynamic websites are web sites whose web pages are generated on fly and provide interactive experience to users. Web pages have interactive navigation and generated on demand in comparison to static websites where web pages navigation are just hyperlink based. Static websites are easily indexable by major search engines but dynamic websites are not easily indexed by search engines. With the point to sell products online, ecommerce storefront are developed providing user interactive interface, this virtual online store provides real time shopping interface to its customers. It is not easy to develop a static website to promote thousands of products and manage those pages, as this requires creating unique pages for every product.
These dynamic websites to create interactivity use either server side scripting or client side scripting languages. Dynamic web pages are created on fly, many web pages really do not exist on the server, on demand they are created when a user generates a query and if the site is database driven, query string is manipulated and then this string pulls the web page from the database and they do not physically exist and thus are not indexed by search engine. It is not really easy to index these websites, but there are few important ways to optimize these websites for search engines.
URL Rewriting: Dynamic web pages URLs are query strings with delimiters like question mark; also these URLs are very long and have encoded variables generated by scripting languages. These links are generated and modified by scripting language by adding a session id to the generated URLs to keep away users from blocking the cookies, these session ids are unique for every visit of Google. Still many search engines do not index these dynamic web pages, the search engine spider get lost in loops. You need to manually rewrite these URLs by removing special characters, symbols and variables like – ?!= these. Some open source content management systems have modules for URL rewriting. Example: Joomla generates search engine friendly URLs and provides page caching mechanism. CGI/Perl script is another way for getting your site indexed by search engines. Query part of dynamically generated URLs is assigned variable that returns a search engine friendly URLs that are easily indexed by search engine crawlers.
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