Internet marketing and database driven websites

March 20, 2008
Internet marketing and database driven websites
One of the most valuable goals of e-commerce sites is to achieve a high ranking in organic search engine listings and consequently promote their online businesses. Search Engine Optimization boosts the organic listings and achieves great results when advertising products or services. According to eye tracking research, online users trust organic search engine results more than paid search results. In order to attain high positions in organic results, static and dynamic websites should adopt sophisticated SEO techniques to stay search engine friendly while attracting engine spiders and gaining search engine listings, ranks, traffics, and ultimately sales. Dynamic websites, also referred as database driven websites, represent a challenge for search engine spiders to crawl and index their contents buried within their database structures. Contrary to static websites, the web pages of dynamic websites are created using active information from databases. Dynamic web pages change every time they are loaded and based request for specific information and products.

Companies use dynamic websites when marketing online huge databases to gather, display and manipulate information. Dynamic websites enable companies to constantly update their content and incorporate a large volume of information, graphics and images. They offer companies the advantage to change product information and prices promptly and regularly. They also facilitate fast retrieval of information along with other data related to products and services that feed interest and preference.

Dynamic websites are not easily indexed and ranked in organic search results. They usually include dynamic content with several functions and never ending links located on one web page. Those functions cause search engine spiders to repeatedly execute them, and endlessly get stuck in infinite loops which can crash the server. Dynamic websites are not easily able to get indexed by search engine crawlers due to their long, complex, and dynamically generated URLs which include spider traps such as question mark, equal sign, as well as other symbols. Therefore search engine spiders are programmed to detect database driven websites and avoid them as well as ignore dynamic URLs altogether. Not being crawled and indexed can negatively affect the SEO marketing and productivity strategy and consequently impact its position in organic search results.

For a website to rank high in SERPs, all its contents have to be successfully crawled and indexed by search engines. The increased number of indexed pages boosts the website chance of ranking high in search results as well as attracting greater number of online visitors. Despite the fact that search engines are currently including dynamically-generated pages in their indexes, some particular dynamic websites are still facing obstacles when getting indexed. Dynamic websites tend to perform poorly in organic search results; they are usually outranked by static websites in competitive keyword markets. Some dynamic sites with extended URL variables are invisible to the search engine spiders as search engine avoid crawling and indexing web pages with dynamic URL and spider traps. As a result, fewer web pages are reached by search engine robots, consequently reducing the sites possibility to rank high in search results.

In order to achieve relevant and more controlled positions in search engine results, dynamic websites have to be fine-tuned when created. While developing a dynamic website, webmasters should optimize their codes in the context of optimizing the search engine ranking. They should assist search engines in efficiently crawling their dynamic websites by providing an HTML site map than can guide spiders to every web page as well as locate the site hard-to-find content. They should also incorporate relevant inbound links from well respected websites and place them deep into the built website. They can also convert dynamic web pages into static web pages by using URL-rewriting techniques. Webmasters should also build static links with spiderable URLs for each web page of the dynamic content in order to boost the dynamic performance and ranking in SERPs.