Dynamic to static (html) conversion

I have an oscommerce based website which is totally dynamic. It has been strongly recommended for me to convert my whole ste into html to get a decent position in Google. I am not a web designer myself, i have to get this done. Is it true all i need is for my web designer to edit the htaccess file. Is this possible and is this recommended?
Does this change mean a file will look like a html file but will actually be dynamic?
I think SEO Chat is using a similar concept right?

Your site is probably in an HTML now. I would not recommend converting it to a static site. There are steps you can take to make dynamic sites appear static.

What is your site's address?

If he is running OsCommerce his site is coded in php. And all sites spit out html, php is just the server side scripting language that is executed to generate the html "on the fly" so to speak.

In any case OsCommerce can not be made "static" nor would you want to make it static lol. What he should be looking to do is make sure he isnt using session ID's in the url, clean up the content, ensure tags are set up correctly (title too) and ultimately consider using mod_rewrite or isapi to create more robot friendly url structures

Example, instead of a page like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/locations/default_new.php?cPath=12&PHPSESSID=d0b20ca5ec5929dea45f40aed7f9481b

make it like
http://www.yourdomain/category1/product12.html

Newer versions of OsCommerce have many of these features built in while older ones do not and will require care in correctly migrating them to a correct and spider friendly structure.

Do you reckon this mod (oscommerce contriubtion) will be enough for me?
http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2823

I would be very careful with these mods unless you know what you are doing (SEO) as you can do some serious damage to your site with incorrect redirects and duplicate page generation. You need to first establish how many and which pages are indexed within the SE's and then ensure your redirect throws out a 301 for inbound requests to the old url and push them onto the new url. The catch 22 is that you need to be positive that the old url is 301'd and that the mod didnt just convert old structure to new structure; thus making the same content available on both url's.

Also while Google is pretty good with a 301 I have seen many sites tank on Yahoo after doing a significant url structure change like this for a month or two.

You're not going to hurt yourself by leaving up oscommerce. In fact, short term you're likely to do more harm than good. If your site is already spidered I'd leave it alone. Google doesn't discount pages if they are dynamic or statis. The only exception is if you have an absurdly large query string (everything after the ?) or pass session variables by query string.

Ithink it would be a good idea but keep these important things in mind before doin anythig

. URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)

. Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)

. Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)

· Pages requiring a "Session ID" or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)

· Pages that are split into "frames" can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.
Possible "Walls" for SE Spiders:

· Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button

· Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them

· Documents accessible only via a search box

· Documents blocked purposefully (via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file - see more on these here)

· Pages requiring a login

· Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)