SEO friendly publishing content

[addstravel]

I am looking to develop a SEO friendly dynamic page for a client whereby the blulk of the page content will be contained within a database column. I will be incorporating URL rewrite technology so the page name/location is SEO friendly. However, if the bulk of the page is not static text surely this will not be readable by search engines, so the page will not be indexed accordingly?
Is this a problem, or is the indexing based on the page name and links using this page name etc?

[wwb_99]

Friendly names are a bit a of a red herring. Anyhow, if a browser can make a HTTP GET request and receive HTML content, then most search engines (and any search engine that matters) can read the page.

[addstravel]

I see, so unless I can create the page as static content (html) so that it can be read by SE bots it won't be indexed?

How are page names red herrings? I thought google looked at page names as one of many factors to influence page ranking?

Your thoughts much appreciated....

[wwb_99]

No, not at all--you read that completely backwards. So long as google can make a HTTP GET request to your page and get the content, it does not matter how the page is built--be it from a database or a bunch of kids shaking rocks in a bag.

Friendly URLs are good for a number of reasons, but they are not going to make or break your search positioning. Basically the only thing that really, really can effect that is actually having good, relevant content that people can link to and google can index.

[bluedreamer]

I see, so unless I can create the page as static content (html) so that it can be read by SE bots it won't be indexed?

How are page names red herrings? I thought google looked at page names as one of many factors to influence page ranking?

Your thoughts much appreciated....

It doesn't matter "how" the page is generated, all the search engine will see is *text* anyway, you can query as many databases as you like, and run umpteen scripts behind the scenes but the end result will always be a plain old HTML. What you see on any web page is, in all essence, static text!

Making a page "SEO" friendly is about the actual content on the page - page titles, meta tags, headings, text, associated images - and how it's worded.

To a search engine spiders the page is really not much more than just a reference to the page.

[addstravel]

Thanks guys.

Of course it will be read as HTML - I was being slow here, my apologises.

Really appreciate your feedback on this... cheers.

[honeymonster]

You may have heard that search engines will not index (or rate lower) pages with querystrings (the text after the ? mark).

That's myth. Utterly false. Fantasy. FUD.

To search engines the URI is a URI, with or without extra path info, querystring etc. As said above: what matters is whether the SE can issue a GET request with the URI and receive a meaningful response.

Some have theorized that SEs may reward URI which contains the keywords with higher ranking. There's no facts or any indication from the SE providers on this, though, so it remains speculation.

What matters is the content of the pages and (more importantly) how many other sites link to your pages. Thus, it is vitally important to design the URIs to be persistent. Once published you should always leave the content under that URI - or provide a forwarding address.

Some search engines tracks the behaviors of the visitors. If a visitor search with a certain keyword (or combination), follows a link to your site but immediately returns to the search result page and follow another link or even performs another search; the search engine may conclude that the visitor didn't find any relevant information on your page for the keyword combination; thus decreasing the rank.