Database driven site - Is there any experts out there?

"Wanting to know the best way to optimise a page within a database driven site. For example, the product.asp would kick out an error if accessed directly from a Search Engine due to not having any values for the database to read. Any suggestions?"

you could check to see if the querystring contains an id (or whatever you pass) if the id is nothing ie. is product.asp, then display an index of all (or some with page through buttons) products. this then gives a page the spider can follow to get all of your listed products

you should take these measures for your users not just the search engines

look at:

http://www.seochat.com/viewtopic.php?t=1026

The best way to achieve top search engine rankings with a database driven site is to build a script that spits your dynamic pages out as regular old HTML pages.

I've done this with several sites and its a great way to get a ton of pages indexed by google. One of my sites currently has over 1500 pages indexed!

lowell,

how is this done, could you provide more of an insight that would be great

well I'm assumimg your product.asp is expecting to see a product id in an url field (e.g. product.asp?id=1234) and you then do a sql select on that. So just check for the existance of url.id before doing the sql lookup, if the url.id is not there of if the recordcount from the sql select is zero just do a redircet to another page

It can get pretty technical. There are mainly two ways to create SE friendly dynamic urls.

1. Apache Mod_rewrite function
2. PHP and .htaccess / path arguments

Point one requires some server side programming experience or try a search on Google for 'mod rewrite +search engine friendly' for help. It is pretty heavy stuff though (for me anyway )

Point two is essentially what I have done on my own German language phpbb forum but only works with php pages and is pretty complicated. I confess I couldn't have done it myself without help.

Maybe others here can expand because frankly I'm not really a big enough geek at server side stuff (yet) to give you the full low down. :-)

If the user comes from SE without any values included you can set him default values in php it's written very easy:

if (!isset(id)) { do smth / id == seuser }
else { }

easy way, i dunno much about asp, but i wouldn't do dynamic pages in it, it generates very slowly and can stop googlebot from crawling allover your page. PHP is the best solution for this and when you're using MySQL or PostgreSQL with it you can do it very easily.

A big thankyou for all your help and advice in this matter.
It's nice to have a forum like this that with people visiting here that provide good helpful advice.

I have a database driven site. It is no problem, as long as there are links that the spider can get to. If some pages are only displayed as fx. part of a search result it is another story.
f.eks a link to www.mysite.dk/product.asp?id=23 is no problem

Well, Im not that familiar with ASP, but here is how you would do it (in pseudo code):

query the database to get the information about the product that you want to display on the page

then you would create a string which would hold all of the HTML for the web page.

Once you have built the string of HTML, you write that string to a file and just name it with a .html extension. Im sure ASP has some decent functions for writing files.

repeat for all of your products


If you do it this way, you will also need to come up with a linking structure, since all of your linking will be between HTML pages and not between ASP pages.

If you go to www.dancoindustries.com/shipping_supplies/ you can see how I have created my directory of products. All of the category/subcategory/product info is stored in a database and I just grab that data and use it to write out a bunch of HTML files.

What you end up with is a huge site of HTML pages -- something that search engines love!

I have developed an 'engine' that will automaticly meta tag, title, and give keyword prominence and density to what keywords I specify for each product/page. This seems to help quite a bit. I would store meta/title information in the database with your products. If each product has different meta/title/page information then the rest of your sites, its more likly to be recognized by google.

google doesnt care a bit about meta tags.....the title tags are what google really likes. . .

Keep it simple, just create a SiteMap page that contains links to all your dynamic pages with all the variables included.

No need to acctually make .html pages for each link. Your site map does not even need to be an .html page. I use this technique on all my clients sites because they are all .asp and database driven. It works like a champ and all dynamic pages get indexed.

Example would be:

<link code>NewSearchForm.asp?City=Orlando&State=Florida&Country=USA&Source=test

Blah, Blah, Blah you get the picture. Now just create links to all your .asp pages and then submit your site map. You may also want to use the robots.txt file to instruct the bots to nopt index the page but follow all the links.

Good Luck