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CMS method appropriate to SEO

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MustangPriMe

IS-IT--Management
Oct 9, 2002
74
GB
I'm looking to implement a CMS for our website.

As I see it there are two main methods:
1. The precomplied approach where html files are physically created in the appropriate struture from content held in a database, and the html files are what the visitors see.
or
2. The on-the-fly approach where the content is served up from the database as and when needed. The vistior calls the same physical page each time, but the querystring identifies the content to be served.

I would favour the 2nd approach as it allows me to be more flexible in terms of what I need to be able to do.

However, I'm concerned about the negatives, particularly the impact on SEO. One of the factors in good SEO is having keywords within your URL. So the first approach might have a page and the second approach might have the same page under
Obviously from a search engine point of view, the first approach is better, but are there ways around this? Do search engines give the same weighting to the querystring? E.g. would overcome this?

Or are there other methods, and I'm barking up the wrong tree?

I considered having a virtual structure where didn't actually exist but was handled by a custom 404 page which served up the appropriate content, but didn't consider this to be good practice!

I'd prefer to keep the on-the-fly approach for flexibility. Performance isn't too much of an issue as it's not a very high volume site. We're also on a shared server, so limited in some of the things we can do.

Any suggestions welcome,
Thanks
Paul
 
I mean by using whatever method is appropriate. There are various solutions you can implement via IIS or directly in the server-side language you are using.


------------------------------------------------------------

Mark,
[URL unfurl="true"]http://aspnetlibrary.com[/url]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://mdssolutions.co.uk[/url] - Delivering professional ASP.NET solutions
 
One of the factors in good SEO is having keywords within your URL.

Do some tests and see if this actually IS a factor. I'll wager that you will find that it makes next to no difference. It's a myth (at least when only having a couple of parameters in the querystring).

However, in my own CMS I have written it to create 'friendly' URLs. This is mainly to aid people remember page addresses though.. and I think it looks neater :)

This was done by creating a url column in my database table and looking up the page based on it's 'friendly name'. The danger, of course, is that someone might make 2 pages with the same friendly URL, so I automatically construct them based on the parent page's friendly url.

See it here.
I would stress though, that search engines can cope fine with the parameters in the querystring. So don't feel like you MUST have friendly urls for search engine purposes. It will make no difference.

Far more important are your page titles, page content and incoming links.

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Thanks both for your comments.

Foamcow - I already had a 'fldAliasUrl' in my database I was tinkering with to acheive the same result. Good to see someone else thinkng the same way!
I guess that I was thinking that relying so heavily on the custom 404 page to deal with serving up all the pages just "didn't seem right".

However, having thought about it a bit more today, I can't think of a good enough reason why it can't/shouldn't be relied upon.

I might just post a query in an IIS forum just to make sure though!

Cheers
Paul
 
To clarify, what I do is use htaccess and modrewrite (I use Apache/PHP) to change the urls.

So...


gets invisibly rewritten to


The user sees the former URL in their address bar.

This can get a bit overcomplex and if building a large site I would rethink this as it might get a bit resource intensive. But for the small sites I build it's fine.

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