Member Avatar for teedoff

My questions pertain to CF templates and search engine rankings. I work for a small web based company with a static site that has been live for probably 4 or 5 years now. The owner coded all the pages alone, using somewhat outdated html standards as well as outdated SEO methods, I think since I know very little about SEO.

Anyway, I have been hired to build a parallel site utilizing a server-side scriting language and database so manage the tens of thousands of products he sells. He is, I think, adament about his page rankings, and has done an awesome job gaining top 5 ranking for just about any product he sells. Of course he is also adament about this new CF based site getting high rankings as well. I have tried doing some research and have read many different view points about how search engines handle dynamic sites and databases. I always assumed that since a CF template was processed by the DB server and CF server then sent back to the Web server to be translated BACK to simple html code, that it really didn't matter if it was a CF page or a static html page, the spiders would read the same code.

I know this is long, but trying to explain so much here. lol So, in building these CF pages, I added a "keyword" field in the DB and included the keyword variable in the head section of my pages. When opened in a browser, you see exactly what an html page would look like.

I would like some advice, tips, do's and dont's, whatever suggestions anyone might have about Coldfusion pages and SEO.

If you would like to view his static site and google some products here it is:
www.replacementlightbulbs.com

Also my CF site, which is not in production yet, but is live on a personal hosting site is:
www.michael-sexton.com/rlb/index.cfm

Thanks for any help in advance!

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Member Avatar for teedoff

ok maybe it IS too long and ppl dont want to read through it. lol I just need some tips, suggestions, links possibly on how to make sure a CF site is getting high organic search rankings. Again look at the links above and give me some tips. The html site ranks in top 5 on most any product related search you can think of, so I want near the same for the cfm site. TIA

Member Avatar for Dani

Hi ... Yeah, your question is a little long :)

I guess what I'm confused about is what specifically you are asking. It's hard to give you feedback because many of the links in your dynamic version don't work. For example, I clicked on Replacement Light Bulbs and all of the links to specific products just redirect me back to the homepage.

Also, I looked at the HTML code for this page and don't see any meta keywords or descriptions.

Member Avatar for teedoff

Ahh well sorry for the confusion and also for the confusion on the links in the dynamic site. That site is still under development, which I neglected to mention, therefore most of the thousands of products will either not be linked anywhere, or will link back to the static site.

Again, what I am asking/wondering is this. I have read many articles about how dynamic websites dont naturally rank well in searches. I dont know if this is true, but in the beginning stages of developing this new dynamic site, I want to take every step to ensure it will rank well. I know many pages dont have well thought out titles and such, but I think I may have to do that dynamically as well, since I am trying to use as little hard html coding as possible.
I just want to know some basic ideas and tips on how to code and design a dynamic website to get ranked well. The owner of this company is very fanatical, with good reason, about this, so I want to do the best I can. Hope that clears it up.

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