SEO Basics - Dynamic URLs, and More...

Here's a typical issue and question asked by many webmasters. They started out asking about dynamic URLs and SEO, but the exchange quickly evolved into other actually more important SEO principles. I've removed any actual URLs and have not provided any screenshots here, to protect the innocent. :)

Hi there - The organization where I work is looking for help on how best to optimise the site for the Search Engines. I have done a lot of reading, a lot of information going through one ear, circulating the brain cells, then falling out the other ear leaving a few crumbs behind!! ...good keywords, alt tags for the images and links are required I believe .. and I will keep researching. But I am concerned about the page url's. I am not sure why they all look like this http://www.mydomain.com/main.php?id=3 . The pages are static, the information is not often changed at all. Is this good or bad for SE? Any advice I can pass on would be appreciated. Thank you. Sue

These days, dynamic URLs are only an issue if (1.) your URLs and site are designed such that following links might create "spider-traps" for the crawlers (where search engine spiders get caught in an infinite looping of links within your site - such as with calendar links that go to infinite number of future and past months - at which point they will simply abandon your site), or (2.) when dynamic variables are appended to URLs (such as datestamps or session IDs) which would create the problem of duplicate content (where the same page is reachable through different URLs).

Your website appears fine in both regards... However, you have much more serious problems to worry about in terms of SEO. Here's the quick overview:

If your page is missing a description, then the search engines will try and figure out a summary for you. Read that last sentence again... Yes, it's true - and this is a significant indicator of how much the search engines want your content. They will do this two ways:

First, if you don't provide any META description tag, but your page content is displayed in a fairly straight-forward manner, the search engines will make a "guess" as to the topic of the page (using complex keyword weight algorythms), and then they'll extract a bit of text from around the sentence(s) or paragraph that is most weighted towards the topic they *think* you've written about. That's bad. Computers are dumb, and rarely get the topic correct.

Alternately, if there's no description and the topic of the page is too hard to figure out, search engines will see if your site has a DMOZ listing and will extract the summary of your website provided by the human editors there. Again, this is bad... Why force them through all this trouble, which will only result in a description that is not entirely accurate, when you could just write a few sentences yourself and put them into the META DESCRIPTION tag?

Remember, your META descriptions become the "teaser" text you see under the links to your articles or pages on Google and other engines' search results pages... so be sure that description is adequate to describe the page and your business to someone who has NO idea who you are, and who is NOT already on your website. The description must provide a stand-alone summary for potential visitors who are NOT on your website, and who have no other context with which to associate one article or page from another.

When a link to one of your pages appears on the search results of one of the major search engines, you had better make sure the title and description are interesting AND ACCURATE enough to make that link look better than the other 20 on that results page they're looking at.

Note: Never EVER try and "game" search engines by using descriptions or titles that don't actually relate to the content on your pages. They're smart enough to check that now, and it only takes one or two mistakes like this to get your entire website banned from all major search engines.

3. Use good old HTML hierarchical conventions. The H1 tag must be the first, main visible title, followed by your normal paragraph text, and then also use H2, H3, etc as needed for any subheaders.

4. Remove (never use) META KEYWORDS tags. The search engines have pretty much ignored them for many years now. Or, I should be more accurate: KEYWORDS tags do nothing to add to your favorable scores with the search engines, but they are used as a factor of your negative ratings. It's best to just remove them, and be safe. No reason to temp fate and mess with something that has clearly been abused since the very start of the tag.

Good SEO also means you have to step back once in a while, and just look at your homepage as if you're one of your own first-time visitors or prospective customers. If people - yes, real live people - have a good experience on your website, they'll talk about it, promote and link to it, and do all sorts of things that help increase the popularity of your site with the search engines... And all this promotion of your site is FREE.

So, forget that you've been looking at your own site a million times every day for several years, and ask yourself "...Self?... What would this homepage look like to someone who has NEVER seen it before? Does it make sense? Is it organized well? Does it clearly denote resources and provide navigation paths for specific types of users that need to be served here..? "

Temporarily set aside everything all the departments and competing interests in your company are telling you THEY want the visitors to see and do on your website, and just remember it's your job (and much more important) to figure out (1.) what visitors ARE actually doing on your site, and (2.) what THEY want to do on your site. If your site content and navigation aren't serving the needs of your users and visitors, then it's another one of those useless websites that no one will visit or use.

What does your company do exactly? There's no content (keywords) or description that summarizes your organization's objectives. Yes, you have ALT tags on your images, and the company name is there under the logo... But that's not nearly enough - both in terms of search engine optimization or usability. If you manage to get people landing on your homepage, the first thing they want to do is see if your organization does what they expect or want.

The thick marketing/corporate lingo and catch-phrases that make your CEO happy actually don't do anything on this site for your audience. Who is your audience, and what "language" do they speak? I'm not talking internationalization, but rather are they technical and geeky, or salespeople and marketeers, decision-makers or recommenders, browsers or buyers? Do they understand the lingo here? Reading your content, I have no idea what you're talking about in many cases... and I've always considered myself a fairly smart person! :)

I'm getting sidetracked on usability issues - but it'll just take a second: You have blue text (images) that don't click anywhere, and then you have blue text (images) that do link somewhere... Make it clear to me (the user) how to get into your site... Right now, I'm looking at your homepage and wondering why you're making me mouseover the entire page before I find something that I can click. Almost ALL of your users will NOT do this. If it's not clear what you do, or where they can go from your homepage, they won't. Users do NOT have patience, nor will they click something just to see what is on the other side. If it's not perfectly clear what will happen BEFORE they click, they won't. Period.

6. Write for the web (another usability issue) -- Reading more of your site content, I can see your organization has a heavy marketing presence. Be sure and search Google et al for "writing for the web" (which requires an "inverted pyramid" writing style) or "how users read on the web" and spend some time learning and teaching your organization why the current language (lingo) and writing style they've used here (on the web) is completely wrong.

Here's a fairly accurate summary of writing for websites (PDF), which I found (clicking this link opens an Adobe Acrobat PDF file)

I've read several pages on your site and I STILL don't know what you do... I can only guess (after 10 minutes already - even though a typical visitor would only give you 30 seconds before deciding to leave and go elsewhere), what your business provides. Someone like me is very likely part of your typical demographic or audience... but, I don't get that from your website. I don't know what you do. Your site needs to do a better job of talking to ME (your prospective customer).

(7.) Dynamic drop-down menus, fancy Flash animations and javascript or form-based navigation are not spiderable, and therefore none of that content and links would be found or read by the search engines...

Search engines generally only follow text (or standard HREF) links, and don't read inside of javascripts or DHTML menu scripts. You can use CSS visible/hidden based menus, which load all text and links into the source code where it can be read by spiders, or at the very least, add a "Site Map" link into your page header and footer, which links to a page where you have plain, simple HTML HREF links to every single page on your site.

* And whatever else was mentioned above (I'm not writing a formal paper for you today :)

Sure, you could go the extra mile and get yourself into the most advanced SEO techniques possible - such as rewriting all your URLs to include keywords, (in your case, that's not really necessary because your site isn't involved in a highly competitive space, and it's a good bet that this practice is being overdone, to the point where it is (or will soon) be counted less and less towards your favorable score and super-secret ratings assigned to your site by the engines' indexing and cataloging algorythms).... But before you go into that advanced stuff, you really need to get the basics down solid.

There are plenty of resources out there to help you check out your website from a programatic perspective (and it's assumed you've been around the block enough to know that software and computers are still pretty dumb, so be sure and balance whatever output and reporting they provide with some "gut feel" from your own experience and/or the expertise of outside consultants.

(b.) On Google, use the search syntax "site:www.yourdomain.com" (without the quotes), and that'll show you (1.) the number of pages Google et al can "see" (the depth to which their indexing mechanisms have managed to access your site and content), and (2.) it provides a nice easy view of all the page titles and descriptions they've found (...information you can use to improve and change the site presentation and code).

Looks like many of your pages have been crawled, but you're in the best position to know whether the descriptions are accurate and solid... Obviously you can see the page titles are an issue... There's no way of knowing the difference between your contact page and a really useful page that would make me want to become a customer...

(c.) Use some analytics tools (Google Analytics is my favorite), but there are many more out there, and just take a regular look at where your traffic is coming from... Hide this tool from management for as long as possible. They won't know what they're looking at, but they'll be more than happy to tell you what it means and what changes to make to the site as a result... so it's best that you just explain the relevent details for them and never let them see the actual reporting area directly. :) Yes, I'm a big fan of Dilbert, and have experienced enough office politics to know of what I speak. :)