Aside from that, there will be less chance of appearing in the top 10 for a search phrase because it isn't reflected in the title. In general, you should have important key phrases not only in the body of the page but in the title tag (and meta description and meta keywords tag even though they aren't as important).

But if you have a dynamic site, how do you do this? Well, a lot depends on the structure of that site. If you are creative you can have a fully optimized dynamic site with very little work.

One thing I suggest to many of my clients who have dynamic sites is to pull categories and/or products as well as locations from the database into the proper head tags. I suggest this because, with most products, a searcher will likely search for a product in their geographic area, so why not give them a result in their area?

An example title tag could be:

"Site.com supplies <PRODUCTS> in <CITY>, <STATE>."

Here you can see that there are 3 fields which are being called from the database to help create the title tag. If this site sold coffee grinders in Seattle WA, the title would then read: "Site.com supplies coffee grinders in Seattle, WA."

See how easy that was? Now this imaginary site, that could be hundreds of thousands of pages, has an optimized title tag.

Of course you could also provide more competitive phrases. For example:

"Site.com supplies <PRODUCTS> and other coffee making equipment in <CITY>, <STATE>."

In this case, we have the more competitive "coffee making equipment" phrase in the title of every page on the site. Of course all of this depends on the structure of your database and if you can actually pull these fields into the HTML. But if you can pull it, and you, or someone you know, is good at programming languages, then this can be done for your site.

Other things to consider when doing this - if you can, see if there are other places you can place key phrases. You can use alt tags, or other areas in the page body to increase keyphrase density. You don't want to go overboard however. Try to keep it down to a couple of alt tags, and only 2 or 3 keyphrase occurrences per page.

Also, you might want to consider pulling more fields into the HTML if possible. For example, if there is a broad category and then a product category, then perhaps you could display both:

"Site.com sells <BROAD CATEGORY> such as <PRODUCT> and other coffee making equipment in <CITY>, <STATE>."

Here you can see we are taking advantage of 4 database fields to help build the title. This title would come out like:

Site.com sells coffee making supplies such as coffee grinders and other coffee making equipment in Seattle, WA." In this title, "coffee making supplies" is the broad category; "coffee grinders" is the product; "Seattle" is the city and "WA" is the state. We also have our broad, highly competitive phrase in there - "coffee making equipment."

As you may see, there is lots of flexibility in how you create your optimization code for your dynamic site. It is one thing to have it indexable, but it is another thing entirely to have it show up in the search results.

But with proper planning, and a little experimentation it shouldn't take long to find the right blend of database fields and text to create the best optimization you can for your site.

It is also important to remember that people change. As the web gets more mature, and its users become more demanding, you may have to review and revise your optimization tactics, and rewrite whatever is needed to suit users.

You can do this though through monitoring your server logs for referral activity and see what it is that's driving traffic to your site. Then you can emulate one of your visitors. Perform a search using the same search engine and search phrase as your visitors do and look at the results. Would you click on your link? Why or why not? What about your competitors links? Is there something that they are doing which you could emulate?

These are all considerations once you have determined your best course of action. Remember, this is like any other optimization tactic - it will be an ongoing operation which may require you to revisit the strategy every few months to ensure that it still is driving the right traffic. But if done correctly it should help increase not only the number of visitors to your site, but the quality as well, turning your site into the conversion tool it should be.

Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Enquiro.com

Copyright 2004 - Searchengineposition Inc.