How to make website more SEO friendly when the content is coming from the database?

Question

How can i make my database content search-able on SE,

so basically how to make a website more SEO friendly where the data is not static,

it will come from the database.

Answer 1

It doesn't matter whether its content is loaded from a database or a static file, as long as it's being loaded server-side (ie. by PHP) rather than client-side (ie. by JavaScript). Crawlers see no difference, and so the same guidelines apply.

Answer 2

You need to provide the correct meta tags on your web pages such as the Keywords tag in order for search engine crawlers to determine that the contents on your pages are relevant.

If your content is coming from the database and you cannot change it then perhaps you could write a web control to determine the most popular words in your content and then present these automatically within the keywords meta tag.

Answer 3

Provide links to it.

You can't create a form which has form control in which end-users specify what they want to retrieve: because a search engine won't fill in the form (and therefore won't retrieve the data).

Instead you need to serve a page which includes hyperlinks to the various data.

Answer 4

Most search engines provide a way of specifying sitemaps that essentially tell them how to access certain pages that can't be found through normal crawling. For example, pages accessed through javascript or form submissions that generate a URL (method=GET).

Search engines index pages, not databases. Your pages can be dynamic, crawlers come back often enough to update the indexed content and incorporate any new content. You don't have to provide a URL for all pages, just the first page in a series. The search engine will find and follow any pagination links, and index the subsequent pages.

Answer 5

FRKT is correct that the search engines don't know where content is coming from.

Meta tags, while still somewhat important, don't have the same effect they used to. Include them, but don't consider them the be-all, end-all of how to get higher in SEO.

Start by making sure that the page you generate is W3C compliant. Once it's working, put it into the w3c validator at http://validator.w3.org/ and make it 100% correct. A search engine can't see code if it's poorly structured.

Now, comes the tough part....the other stuff. Nobody REALLY knows everything that the Googles of the world look for, but we've all got pretty good ideas. For example, you'll be higher in search rankings if your domain has "aged" or been out on the web for a while....makes sense, you're not a fly by night operation if your URL has been in operation for months. Keep your content fresh, use proper markup (such as titles in h1 tags, content in p, and ensure that you're not "hiding" your content using images without Meta tags or burying important text in Flash.

Google and Bing provide "webmaster tools" that you can embed in your site and analyze the code to take some of the guesswork out of what the browser sees. See https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and http://www.bing.com/webmaster Don't miss this free opportunity to make things better.

Good luck. Building a strong SEO site with a CMS is not difficult at all if you take your time and think through your actions.

Answer 6

In addition to the other comments, use search engine friendly URLs. This will require you to rewrite your URLs.

Some links:

• http://www.seoconsultants.com/articles/1000/urls
• http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls
• http://www.evolt.org/article/Search_Engine_Friendly_URLs_with_PHP_and_Apache/17/15049/index.html%22

The basic idea is that a search engine can do more with a URL in the format:

http://mysite.com/cars/toyota/tacoma

Than it can with a URL in the format:

http://mysite.com/item.php?mid=123&modid=456