Working with Big Brands and Dynamic Sites in the Search Engines

  Recorded Live: April 14, 2006 Segment 1; Segment 2; Segment 3

Hear about the Challenges and rewards of working with Big Brand Websites
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If you work with big brands and dynamic websites, you can relate to the challenges and rewards that Jeff Carpenter will be sharing with us today. Listen in to hear how he has managed to develop successful relationships with his clients and achieve the results they desired. What are some of the issues that come up when optimizing big brands? How can the brand be affected through SEO? What can be done to convince them SEO is needed? How do you deal with clients that have in house designer and developers that are very protective of their code? How do you increase link weight for big brands?

Discover the Challenges of Optimizing Dynamic WebSites
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What are big issues for optimizing dynamic websites? How do URL strings affect rankings? What issues do having only a handful of templates to build large sites cause? What problems to Cookies and Session IDs cause? Can you use them at all? What are the issues with getting content on every page of the site?

More on the Challenges of Optimizing a Dynamic WebSite
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Does a dynamic website get indexed different when compared to a static website? Is there anything you can use to help dynamic websites get indexed faster? Are their issues dealing with the developers when optimizing a dynamic website? When optimizing a shopping cart are their sections you don’t optimize, or do you optimize it differently?

Summary of Working with Big Brands and Dynamic Sites

Working with Big Brands and Dynamic Sites in the Search Engines When you're trying to tell a big brand that they need SEO, you usually have to explain to them that no matter how much money they have spent in offline advertising campaigns and no matter how well they rank in their particular industry, the spider attach no importance to their site unless they optimize.

On the web, you gain number one position in the Search Engine listings by employing SEO. In the offline market, on the other hand, your position in the industry depends on the reputation of your company, the quality of your products and effective advertising. Mitsubishi, Oakley and Odyssey are some of the big brands MEA Digital is working with.

Hear about the Challenges and rewards of working with Big Brand Websites

When big brands hire SEO specialists, they are usually reluctant to make any changes to their website and diminish the user experience in any way. They don't realize that if you make a website entirely in flash, the spider will not be able to read it and, as a result, the website won't rank well on the search engines.

Graphic designers in particular give little importance to content and focus too much on flash and using cutting edge technology. Jeff explained how important it is to strike the perfect balance between the user experience and the availability of good quality content in HTML on the site.

MEA Digital has found that hybrid sites that use pockets of flash and have content written in HTML below, above or next to a small movie are very successful. The spider doesn't notice the small flash movies (you can have more than one on each page) and jumps to the HTML text. The hybrid pages load quickly too, as the text obviously loads very quickly and the small flash movies don't take much time either.

Jeff gave a wonderful example of this. You can have flash navigation at the top of your page to improve the user experience and you can reproduce that navigation in HTML at the bottom of the page.

People hardly ever pay much attention to the links in the footer and will use the flash navigation whereas the spider will jump directly to the HTML navigation at the bottom of the page. This will allow the spider to navigate the entire site and go through all your pages which it wouldn't be able to do through the flash navigation.

Creating a website in CSS is also very effective as you have the option of pulling in the content layer in first and the flash and the server site last. As a result the page loads very quickly and the user experience is enhanced.

In CSS you can give the content greater prominence by putting it first in the code so that the spider reads it first. However, because of the design element, when users visit the site, they won't necessarily see the content first and flash later.

MEA Digital shows their clients the importance of SEO by using a spreadsheet tool they have created. First, MEA Digital finds out how much traffic each term is generating. They then put this data into the spreadsheet and based on the position of the client's website on the search engines, the tool will estimate what percentage of this search traffic you'll see through "click throughs" on the search engines.

As a result, MEA Digital is able to make a fairly accurate estimate of how much traffic their clients will get per month. As a result, clients are able to estimate what their monthly revenue will be as they usually know, on an average, how many visitors will convert to sales and what the average order value is. Multiplying these two values gives the estimated monthly revenue. In this way, the clients are able to see the affect the position of the site on the search engine has on their traffic, sales and revenue.

Marketing Sherpa published a report that showed that you get 75% of the traffic of the website above you in ranking. So, for example, if the website that holds number one position on the first page gets 100 clicks, your website will receive 70 clicks if it is one position number two and so on. In this way you can estimate how much traffic you will receive if you occupy a particular position on the first page of the search results.

MEA Digital provides its services to different companies in different ways. For example, Mitsubishi has hired them to build and manage their site and handle their online marketing. In this case, MEA makes changes to the code and the client needs to approve of the changes before they are uploaded.

Oakley, on the other hand, has in-house designers and developers. In this case MEA has to write a detailed explanation of the changes the designers and developers must make and how to actually make those changes. This is equivalent to teaching the design department exactly what they need to do in order to get the results that MEA wants.

Another client simply zips their entire website and sends it to MEA. MEA then goes about making changes to the code and sends this modified version back to the client so that it can be approved and uploaded.

Link weight is just as important for big brands as it is for smaller brands. The only benefit big brand have is that it is easier for them to get links.

Discover the Challenges of Optimizing Dynamic WebSites

Regarding link building, since reciprocal linking and buying links are no longer considered to be goods linking strategies, MEA Digital depends on press releases to build links.

• Using press releases to build links: Every time a client launches a new product(s), hires new people or implements some positive changes etc, MEA Digital issues a roughly 400 word press release. Instead of trying to stuff the press release with keywords, they build the release around a theme. As a result, theme related links point to the client's site and the links come from themed pages.
  
  Usually only 1 press release from a particular company is displayed per page and, in the case of an Oakley press release, for example, that page on Google news would be about Oakley or about sunglasses.
  
  If Oakley launches its latest collection of sunglasses, MEA will issue a press release in which it will give details about the new products and will introduce them to consumers. This press release will contain a link to Oakley's homepage and every time a product is mentioned, a link to the product's page is added. In this way, both the home page and the product page have links weights directly to it.
  
  When these press release go out to Google News, Yahoo News and industry magazines that post these press releases on their websites. Such websites give weighty links. In addition, the links are usually archived on these websites so that the press releases are not deleted from that site. In this way, the links are displayed on these sites for a while.
  
  
• Building links through forums and community boards is also an effective as long as you do it in an appropriate manner. For example, if you go to a snowboarding website or forum and people are talking about "The Flying Tomato", who happens to be an Oakley sponsored athlete, so you can add a post saying "Hey, check out the goggles he is wearing. Are they available at Oakley?"
  
  Such a link would be relative, will generate traffic and will increase sales. It will definitely increase the exposure of the site. However, such links will not have a lot of weight because topics being discussed on forums change and some forums are not spider friendly.
  
  
• URL Strings: Regarding the issues related to optimizing dynamic sites, make sure that the site is search engine and spider friendly and the spider can find the content in the site, otherwise none of the pages inside the site will rank. In order to do this, keep the URL strings as simple as possible. URL strings do affect ranking.
  
  For example, Oakley is a very large dynamic website that was created entirely "on the fly". MEA made sure that Oakley's URL doesn't have too many stop characters. This makes the spider's job as easy as possible. Limit the number of variables in the URL string. It is much easier to remember "oakley.com/surfgear" than it is to remember "Oakley.com/category.asp?"

Rewriting those URL strings with an ISAPI filter for Windows server or the using "mod rewrite" etc not only helps users to remember the actual URL address, it makes it easy for every search engine spider to index the page. This is because search engine spiders to not have a problem indexing a static HTML page, but some smaller engines do have a problem indexing dynamic pages.

So shorten your URL string and mod rewrite your URL string so it tells the server that the site itself is using different links compared to the dynamic addresses. They can still create the actual links dynamically but instead of having all the question marks etc inside of it, it just creates the address with forward slashes to make it look like a directory.

Every time the browser tells the server "Hey, I want this directory", the server knows, based on the mod rewrite rules or the sappy filter rules, that the browser actually means the original long URL string.

Before "mod rewrite" became popular, people used to create static pages for every single dynamic page of their dynamic site. Some SEOs still prefer systems that are dynamic on the back end and they put out HTML files, which are created on the fly. However, Jeff always uses Mod Rewrite.

• Creating Static Pages: Most dynamic websites have a couple of templates and then everything is automated and pulled out of the database, so creating actual static pages is very difficult. There is a way to handle this problem.
  
  Most dynamic websites have certain types of files such as home page, category pages and product pages and main body content templates. You have a lot information that is unique to every single page that has to change on this dynamic template. The title tag on each page on a website should always be different because the content on a particular page is unique to that page.
  
  When developers design these templates they write in static elements that you can use to optimize the page e.g. the title tag. A lot of dynamic websites that aren't built with SEO in mind have the same title across all the pages. They have sections of the page where the code is the same as that on every page because it is coded into the template.
  
  The database that holds the information for these dynamic sites should be created with SEO in mind so that you can have fields and columns in the database to store unique title tags for every page or a description tag or a keywords list.

It's also a good idea to store primary, secondary and tertiary keywords for every page that you optimize so that if you want to use table summary attributes in the html code or title attributes for a reference link or alt tags, you can leverage using a keyword in the alt tag by putting "insert primary term here" and then describe that image. This keyword will change for every page that the template is building because each page has a unique primary term.

Implementing these changes is not too difficult. Usually, you just need to add a few extra columns in the database table and then going through and implementing it in all the content in the pages.

Jeff sets up a default title tag in the code or in the actual template so that he can dynamically generate the title tag out of the database. This is because if he has, for example, a 1000 page website, creating 1000 titles will take a lot of time and if he already has a site up, he won't want to completely take down those titles for all the other pages.

So in the template he'll create a function that checks the database to see if the title value is actually stored in the database. If it is, use the value that is stored, and if it is not, use the default title. Until he's able to create a title for every page, it will just use the default one. So you won't have pages out there without titles and you can do couple of URLs at a time instead of having to do all of them in one go.

Some systems actually use different parts of the content that is already stored in the data base in the title, like a product name or category. It is best to be more specific in the title tag. Using product names, you can create a default title tag that is different on every page.

• Problems created by cookies and session IDs: The session ID is a variable that changes for every user. Every time you come to a website there is a diff session ID. A lot of systems use this so that they can store information for a shopping carts etc.
  
  Every time a search engine spider comes back to your site, the session ID of the links changes.
  
  This works in the following manner: if the Google spider works in phases, the first time it comes to you it just grabs your pages and stuffs them into a bag, the next time it comes to your site he'll go through those pages and figures out what is on them. If the first time he comes he gets a long list of URLS and the second time he comes he sees that those URLS are now different, you'll have four instances of the same page and you'll have duplicate content issues which may get you penalized. These pages may eventually get into the supplemental index because they are like orphaned pages.
  
  Apart from this, avoid session ID variables in your URL strings because search engines can now recognize what session IDs looks like (since they are all long and not easy to remember) and may not index your page or site.
  
  
• Have descriptive content on every page: For dynamic websites, it's best to have blocks of text on the site. Category pages should have brief descriptions of the product that are being displayed on that site. Describe the category and the products that come under that category so that the spider can see that it is a page about, for example, different types of sunglasses.

More on the Challenges of Optimizing a Dynamic Website

In the last segment, we learn how to get dynamic sites indexed and what is different about shopping carts.

• Cookies can be used effectively for dynamic websites and these sites can still be search engine friendly. A lot of websites use cookies to store information about users, such as information about the products that they have stored in their shopping carts.
  
  However, spiders don't use cookies, so don't require cookies to be enabled for browsing. If you search on Google for "site requires cookies", the search results will list thousands of such sites, because when the spider goes to such a site, it can only read the "requires cookie" information and cannot browse your site.
  
  Hence, do not require visitors to have cookies enabled in order to browse your site. This will cut out search engines because they are not going to enable cookies just to visit your site. You can use cookies, but don't require visitors to have cookies enabled.
  
  You do require cookies in the shopping cart process so that spiders don't inadvertently place an order on your site i.e. visitors must acquire cookies if they want to add products to the shopping cart and since the spider will not acquire cookies, it will not be able to go through the ordering process.
  
  You obviously don't want your shopping cart page to rank for one of your terms; you want your product pages to rank for these terms/keywords. Until the user clicks on "add to the cart", don't require the user to require cookies to go through any other part of your website. If you want a page on your site to come up in the search engines, don't require a cookie to go through that page.
  
  This also prevents the spider from going half way through the order process, or you might have order pages showing up in some obscure search results. This also shows that dynamic websites get indexed in the same way as static websites.
  
  
• In order to get a dynamic website indexed faster, use a site map such as Google site map. You can create a site map for your site and add a link to that map to your homepage. In this way you won't need to submit your site map page. Simply submit your homepage with the site map link on it. When the spider goes through your homepage it will grab all the links, including your site map link. Your site map, in turn, has links to all the pages in your website and this makes it easier for the spider to find and crawl through all your pages.

People opt for dynamic websites when they have a lot of content, such as a lot of product pages that they need to organize and keep track of. For very large websites, such as sites with 500 or so categories, you can't have all your links on one page. Instead, build a directory structure for your site map. Link to all your main categories, and on the main category pages you can have subcategories, and links to products in each category. Google suggests keeping your links down to about a hundred a page.

You can have sub site maps, in which, for example, each of your category pages are mini site maps.

Sometimes, it is a good idea to submit a page as a reference to a site if a site desperately needs links. You can put a link on a site that is already indexed in the search engine and when the spider visits that page, it will see the link and visit your site. Do not over submit though, or the search engines will put you on time out or won't index you. However, you should aim to build your site in such as manner that the spider can find it on its own without you needing to submit pages as a reference or putting a link on a site that is already indexed.

It takes several months to optimize a large website. You see results after about three months. Sometimes you see results very quickly. You can start by changing the titles on the page. Optimize a few pages and put them out. Don't wait to optimize all of them and then put them out. The title tags should be very specific and the site should have good link weight e.g. trough press releases.

After you change the URLS, and if somebody had linked to the old URL, create a custom 404 so that users can easily find what they were looking for. If it is a well known page that a lot of people had visited, do a 301 redirect to it, which is an automatic redirect. Less important pages are redirected to the homepage or to another page. Spiders read the 301 redirects and go to the new URLs. For important pages, always use a 301 redirect.

If you're just rewriting the URL, the old URLs strings will work, but once you update the links that are actually in the site to use the new URL strings, all the links in the site when the user starts browsing the site are now changed.

T's best to have both primary results and supplemental results. Once the spider has a page indexed, it may be supplemental for one term and may rank primary for another term.

On the SEMPO website, in the free section of the library, you'll find an article for programmers and people building the code about how to optimize dynamic websites. It's titled "Dynamic Website Optimization".

On the MEA Digital websites, you can find the first part of the aforementioned article (which SEMPO is using as a members-only tutorial) which is in the form of a PDF called "Steps to Proper on Page Optimization". Both articles are excellent and very in-depth.