I recently had an email conversation with the owner of a furniture website that was terribly non-search engine friendly. About the only page the search engine could see was the home page.

The site had recently gone through a redesign and moved from a static version to a dynamic website. Granted this makes inventory management much easier, but it wreaks havoc on already established search engine rankings.

When I gave her a few ideas of what to do to fix the site, her response was "the designers don't want to do that."

Wait a minute, I thought, who owns the business - you or the designer? If your designer is unwilling to make the changes you request, perhaps you should seek a new designer elsewhere.

But that wasn't what I said. Instead I found a few links already on the site which could be easily turned into search crawler friendly links, simply by removing them from JavaScript.

Then I suggested she implement a URL rewriter as the site URL's were extremely long, containing multiple variables.

If she is able to implement the suggestions I've made, she should be able to regain some of the ground she will have lost from the redesign.

This story illustrates the point of this article: That there are still too many websites out there that are either not search engine friendly, or not properly optimized.

In either case, they are essentially part of the 'invisible web.'

The thing that gets me, and a reason I do feel sorry for some website owners, is that they tend to get in the middle of the SEO firm and the designer.

The SEO firm recommends a change and the designer says "sorry I can't (or worse - won't) do that."

But I'm here to tell you that in almost every case, there is a way to make the changes required.

For example, I've been working on a site that has a user forum. As you may well be aware, most user forums are dynamic in nature, and very rarely do you see their pages indexed in search engines.

This is because of the dynamic nature of the URL. Generally it takes multiple variables to build the page and have it display properly.

So in the case of this forum, built on a popular open source package, I began searching for a way to create search engine friendly URLs.

Within 10 minutes of beginning my search I found a forum with a link to a package that gave detailed step-by-step instructions on how to turn this particular forum into a search engine indexable one.

I was able to easily modify code and implement a URL rewriter in less than 20 minutes. At that point the forum went from one page to hundreds.

I've also used a similar strategy to make blogs search engine friendly. The situation is the same - a popular but dynamic blog software. Upon some searching I again found a text file with step by step instructions on how to change 1 line of code and implement a 3 line URL rewrite to make the blog static.

Now, I'm no PHP programmer, but I have to tell you that I've come across this situation many times - either there's a forum, or a blog or even a CMS that isn't search engine friendly, and in every case a little searching has found a solution which is easily implemented which turns that invisible website into a visible one.

Now you're probably wondering what benefit there is to having every blog post or forum entry visible and indexable.

Well, there are a few reasons: First, having more pages indexed means there are now more potential entry points into your site.

People will begin finding your site in the search results for more and different search terms. Sure they may only visit the one (or few) forum pages and leave, but your site has made an impression.

At some point they may come across your site again. This time they may be looking to purchase instead of research. And since you've already made that connection with them days or weeks ago, and likely helped them solve a problem, they will be more willing to deal with you.

Another big advantage has to do with how authoritative your site will now appear to a search engine.

In case after case, I come across good websites being outranked by poorer ones and the only reason seems to be that the higher ranking site has more indexed pages.

Therefore search engines seem to consider a bigger site as more authoritative and in many cases will give the top ranking to that site, even if there's a better more relevant but smaller site out there.

My point, therefore, is that even if your forums topics and discussions aren't directly relevant to your primary product(s) they still contribute to that overall sense of worth your site will convey to the engines.

Another great thing about such a strategy is that your site grows naturally. That means less input from you as the owner having to find and create new content. Because as we know, search engines like fresh new content and will sometimes base their crawler activity on how quickly your site changes.

So if they find that your site changes a lot (because of new static entries in your blog or forum) then they will tend to visit more often, keeping your pages fresher in their cache.

Overall, offering up this content to the search engines is a great way to show them that you are an authority on your topic, helping your site move up in the rankings and achieve top positions (hopefully) for your chosen keyphrases.


Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

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