Database Driven web sites and SEO

Search engine friendly websites is a very common phrase these days. Everyone knows that this is important to have a search engine friendly web site, and yet it is one of the things that is actually often overlooked.

Search engine optimisation companies actually spend a lot of their time analysing a website and removing barriers to the search engines ranking a site highly. At the web development level, it is possible to build a site that is perfectly search engine friendly. One of the hardest types of sites to get right though are database driven websites. This is the first of a two part article on the top ten mistakes made when developing database driven web sites.

1. Duplicated content - It is essential that there are sufficient content changes within database driven pages. Google is not easily fooled by duplicate content used for the sake of creating additional pages so its essential that attention is paid to the quality of content on your site.

2. Pages with duplicate page titles - the page title is a great indicator to the search engines of the primary content of the page. Whilst this is often unique on sites such as e-commerce websites, it is often overlooked in other sites, particularly where small areas of the site are generated from a database, such as news pages.

3. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions - again, this is easy to overlook and set a global or category level meta description. These give the search engines a reason to penalise your site for not giving them enough information, and again, creating a unique meta description for every page is an essential SEO task.

4. Using auto-generation of pages as a shortcut instead of creating good content. This is linked quite closely to point 1, where it is possible to create pages that have only a tiny percentage difference between them. Databases are fantastic ways of storing information, but you still need to put the work in to fill them with content. Unique information about the subject of the page will immensely help both the long tail and the ability of the search engines to determine that a page is valuable.

5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links - potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.

Part two of the article will appear tomorrow.