Making A Heavyweight: Optimizing Database-powered Sites

The Problem

When you are charged with creating a large website powered by a database, the way it is set up heavily affects its ranking in search engines. Even more than static sites, database sites can be optimized to effectively rank for many keywords. For these type of sites the goal is often to rank highly for many long or obscure queries - this is called "the long tail" of search. But what is the best way to optimize a database site? Database sites have their own methodology for optimization, which will be explained below.

Titles

Each page that is served up from your database should have a unique title. Titles are one of the most important factors for Google, Yahoo and MSN when they determine the topic of a webpage. Very often, a site's developer will simply put the overall site name as the title of all pages on the site. This stems from either laziness or a lack of SEO knowledge on the part of the site's developer. As pages are extracted from a database and displayed, it is important to dynamically insert their titles into the website template as a tag.

Interlinking

It is best to interlink the pages of your database-powered site. Sometimes this is very easy to do: if your site is a dictionary site, where each page shows a single word's definitions and synonyms, this is as easy as programmatically making each synonym into a link that points to the synonym's own definition page. In some cases this is difficult, for example when your site is a blog. In those cases, it is possible to either manually insert "related articles" links into each post, or to take advantage of plugins that display "most popular articles", or "similarly tagged articles" at the bottom of each post. This interlinking helps your site gain a higher rank because it allows search engines to see the relationship between pages accurately, rather than see them as totally standalone (and possibly relegate them to the supplemental index).

Static Appearance

It is a benefit to have your pages appear as static HTML pages rather than as parameters to a PHP file which retrieves them. This makes your site appear to search engines as though a person took the time to uniquely write out each page. Such changes to the URL are possible using "mod_rewrite", which is module for the Apache web server (it is a very popular web server, and you always have the option of hosting your website on it). Although it takes time to learn, it is fairly simple to translate a request for a file with a .html extension to the "real" URL of your PHP file with the page name as a parameter.

Descriptive Filenames

Another important factor in the way you structure your URLs is that each page's URL should have the title in it. This is something that your developer should be able to set up. Doing this will guarantee that any keywords that are present in page titles are also present in the URL - another factor that boosts your search engine rank. You can see this in action when you look at blogs - their titles are almost always present in the URL in some form. Sites like Hubpages also allow for inserting relevant keywords into the URL - which is something that you should also do if your site hosts user-generated content.

Because database-powered sites are often much larger than traditional static sites, there is a lot more scope for success when they are optimized. The above techniques should have you and your developers well on your way towards making your site a heavyweight.