SEO dynamic websites
SEO dynamic websites or static pages.
There are many different opinions about dynamic websites, some think that they are not very good for search engine optimization, because the structure of the URLs are not search engine friendly. Normally a URL of a dynamic website has question marks and numbers in it that don’t look very nice and don’t say very much about the content of the page, contrary to a static page where the URL is normally the title of the page or the keywords related to the content. There are ways around this as you can see in this website, which is produced by a blog software called Wordpress that produces dynamic pages.
Dynamic websites are normally produced by programs that retrieve the information stored in a database and the pages are produced on the fly, and retrieving data by numbers is the fastest and easiest way. A dynamic website gives you the ability to have fresh and up to date information and this can be done automatically. To achieve the same with static pages requires a lot of hard work and time.
Search engines prefer static pages because they are human made, but you can make dynamic pages look like static pages without the search engines knowing about it, the difference is the linking structure. Most programs if used as they come produce dynamic URLs with numbers, but if you know how you can avoid this, and make nice URLs with meaning.
There is a module called Mode Rewrite which is a program in the server that can be used to rewrite the URLs on the fly, and this can be done though the use of a special file called .htaccess. A command in this file to call the module before showing the pages solves the problem and the search engines won’t know about it, because they will read only what the server passes to them and not what’s in the server or the database.
Many blog programs and PHP program come with the facility to do this, and it’s very easy to implement, most of them require just to click a button. In Wordpress this facility is in the Options menu under Permalinks, but if your program hasn’t got this facility you can use the .htaccess file to do that, I am not going to teach you how to do this because it can be very complicated and you could cause a lot of damage by change this very important file, but you don’t need to know how to do it because the support stuff from your server will do it for you if you ask them.
You can do a lot with PHP, why use static pages or JavaScript. Static pages made with programs like FrontPage or Dreamweaver are ok, but they require more work and if you want to change the look of the pages you might have to do it one by one, unless you have been clever enough to use templates, and I don’t know about FrontPage but with Dreamweaver this can be done quite quickly, if you know how to use it properly. Try to avoid JavaScript, I explained this in another article, but give you a hint, think about the popups they are made by JavaScript, and the browser warns you about JavaScript.
If you need help in setting up and designing you website contact me, there is a contact form which you can use.
