Have you ever wondered, “How do I promote my fan page on Facebook?” This article reveals 5 Killer ways to use the power of Facebook to grow your fan base.
Why Do You Need a Facebook Fan Page? You may ask, “Why do I even need a Facebook fan page?” Here’s why: Right now Facebook has an Alexa ranking of 2. They are the 2nd most trafficked website next only to Google!
This means your Facebook page will get indexed faster on Google and other search engines, so if you don’t have a fan page, be sure to create one and promote it.
Here are 5 Killer ways to grow your Facebook fans:
#1: Invite People From Your Facebook Friends List
Do you have your personal friends and professional colleagues segmented into lists on your Facebook home page?
I have a number of lists in my personal Facebook account.
You can invite these lists as groups to your Facebook fan page rather of sending individual invites. This is the easiest and fastest way to jump-start your fan base.
When you click “Suggest to Friends” on your fan page, start typing in the name of your friends list in the filtered friends section; for example, “Social Media Experts.” This will automatically send an invitation to your facebook fan page to all of your colleagues listed in that category.
It’s possible that it may take a while before you start seeing those known faces pop up in your fan page because people are busy. There have been a few occasions where I’ve softly nudged them with an individual invite, but I keep that to a minimum.
As you add more people to your network, remember to go back to your same lists and send the invite to the new people you have added. The names of those who have already been invited will be “grayed out” and the invite will only be sent to your new contacts.
#2: Find People With Facebook Search
The updated Facebook Search feature (see the Search bar at the top of Facebook) gives you a view into conversations of your friends and status updates that may even show you who may be looking for the services you offer.
There is even an option to search “Posts by Everyone,” which gives you a glimpse into conversations of people who may not even be connected to you. After entering a search term, there will be a display, “Posts By Everyone.” This allows you to view conversations from others who aren’t in your friend lists.
Here is a screenshot when I entered “buying a home” in the Search field:
As you can see, there is a person saying “I think we are buying a house tomorrow.” If this person is already in your contacts list, the following is a very easy conversation starter: “Hi ______, I saw your Facebook comment about your plans to buy a house tomorrow. Do you need any help with school information in that particular area?”
There is another person stating that they plan to stay in their house for a long time. This can be a potential candidate for a loan refinance. Again, if this person is already a friend on Facebook, it would be very easy to start a conversation without sounding like an annoying salesperson.
#3: Attract People With Facebook Social Ads
Social Ads provide advertisements alongside your Facebook sidebar which show related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like “Leah is now a fan of The Offspring. Would you like to become a fan too?” It is possible to tailor ads to your friends and their interests, which makes it more appealing for them to take action because you are interested as well.
This strategy requires a small budget, but can be very effective in finding your target market. It is very important to do a Facebook search with specific keywords in your particular niche to find out if it’s being talked about on Facebook (see #2 above).
If you click on “Promote With an Ad” on your fan page, you can start a campaign. You can set a daily spending limit of $10, $25, or other appropriate amount. Because I market mostly to businesses with my keywords (such as real estate broker, loan officer, real estate investor, and so forth) which are in numerous profiles as job descriptions I have been able to use Facebook Social Ads effectively for my fan page.
It’s possible to run your Facebook ads for only 4 to 5 days with a $25 per day budget. Then stop the ad for a few weeks if you like and run the same ad again. This allows your fan page to grow in spurts and I have found it to be very effective in growing my fan base without spending a lot of money at once.
#4: Facebook Fan Page Twitter App
The Facebook Fan Page Twitter application is a great tool that brings your Twitter following back to your fan page. When you post a status update, a link or a photo (you can choose) on your Facebook fan page, there will be an update to Twitter with a shortened bit.ly link back to your fan page. This is just pure genius to drive traffic from another source right to your page.
There are other Facebook and Twitter integration applications; however, this is the one that leads people directly back to your page. This gives them an option to become a fan of your page right at that moment if they click on the bit.ly link from Twitter.
#5: Facebook Fan Box Widget
The Facebook Fan Box Widget is a great feature to add to your blog or website. This widget allows you to show your fan base and allows others to become fans instantly. This is just one way to promote your page across several social media sites. It is important to cross-reference all of your social media sites so others can find you and your websites on other networks.
So what do you have to add to this list? Are you finding other effective ways to promote your Facebook fan page? I would love to hear from you and your successes in promoting your pages in the comments below.
If you have any question in this regard, don’t hesitate to ask. You can contact me through our Contact form or just send me an email at Wahid@wahidqazi.com.
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Whether you run a small business from your home or work for a large corporation, you can use YouTube to boost your company. As you probably know, YouTube is a No.1 video sharing community where anyone including you and your business can upload videos for others to view. The trick is to determine the right kind of video to upload, and then finding a way to profit from YouTube viewership.
Using YouTube as a Video Host
Do you already have videos in your business? If your answer is yes, you can easily upload those videos to YouTube, for anyone to view. (Whether anyone wants to view your videos is another story, however, which we’re going to cover shortly.) Aside from making your videos public, there’s one more good reason to upload your videos to YouTube; when YouTube hosts your video, you don’t have to.
That’s right; YouTube is, at its most basic, a giant video hosting website. Instead of taking up valuable storage space on your own web server, you can allow YouTube host your video instead. You will display the video on your own website, of course, but you do it by embedding code for the video in your site’s underlying HTML. The code points to the video on the YouTube site; YouTube then serves the video from its website to appear on your webpage.
Not only you save on storage costs, you also don’t have to pay for all the bandwidth used when visitors watch your videos and YouTube offers unlimited bandwidth. Yes, you still have a slight bandwidth usage when someone views the text of your webpage, but the bandwidth used to deliver the video comes straight from YouTube.
If you run a small business with limits on storage and bandwidth, letting YouTube host your videos can be a real cost saver. And if your video happens to become popular or even viral, you don’t risk having your servers overload and shutdown; YouTube’s servers will handle the load as I said earlier YouTube offers unlimited bandwidth.
Creating an Online Video Presence
What types of videos can your business make for YouTube? It depends on the type of your business and on the way you want to use the Web.
First, look at any existing videos you might have made for use in your business. Perhaps you’ve taped a company meeting, seminar or webinar, or you have a PowerPoint presentation that’s been converted to video. Or maybe you’re a realtor who has recorded video house tours or a motivational speaker who has a speech or two recorded on tape. Any of those videos could make a good beginning point for moving your business to YouTube.
Take the example of realtor. Today, most realtors take digital photographs of the houses they list, and then potential buyers view those photos on their website. But there’s nothing stopping you from using a camcorder to produce a video tour of the house, editing that tour into a short video, and then publishing that video on YouTube. You can then embed the YouTube video on your own website, so that potential buyers can view the video. It’s a great improvement to a realtor’s selling services, and it doesn’t cost you a cent (beyond the cost of shooting the video, of course).
Here’s one more example for you. If your business is a leader in its category, or if you yourself are an industry specialist, you can establish and exploit that expertise via a series of YouTube videos. All it takes is a video camera or webcam pointed at you behind a desk; you then spend three or four minutes talking about a peculiar topic or issue of interest. Think of it as a professional video blog; if you truly know what you’re talking about, it will help to establish your professional credentials and polish your company’s image.
For that matter, there are a lot of different types of videos that can help enhance your company’s image. There may be value, for example, in placing a video online of your company’s most recent sales conference or at least the part that introduces forthcoming new products. Or maybe your company has hosted a seminar or conference that is of interest to others outside your company. These videos can be edited for duration and uploaded to YouTube, where any interested party can view them.
That said; there is one type of video that you don’t want to upload. YouTube is not the place to recycle your company’s commercials. Users will not go out of their way to view something online that they try to avoid in the real world. Unless you have a really clever, Super bowl worthy commercial that people want to view again and again, keep your ads to yourself and don’t upload them to YouTube.
Promoting Products and Services via YouTube
So far, I’ve talked about videos that only broadly boost your company, in terms of enhancing your company’s image. You can also use YouTube more directly to boost your company’s products and services that is, to drive potential customers to your website where they can buy what you sell. To do this, you need to make and upload videos that function as online infomercials, subtly boosting your company’s products and services.
Let’s say that you offer gift baskets for sale. You create a short video for YouTube about how to make gift baskets something that would be of interest to anyone in the market for them. You prominently display your web page address and phone number within the video, and in the descriptive text that accompanies the video on the YouTube site. Because the video has some informational content (the how-to information), it attracts viewers, and a certain percentage of these will follow through to purchase the gift baskets you have for sale.
Or maybe you’re a business consultant and you want to promote your consulting services. To demonstrate what you have to offer potential clients, you create and upload some sort of short video a motivational lecture, perhaps, or a slideshow about specific business practices, or something similar. You use the video to establish your expert status and then display your email address or web page URL to solicit business for your consulting services.
Or maybe you have a full-length DVD for sale. You excerpt a portion of DVD and upload it to YouTube, with graphics before and after (and maybe even during) the video detailing how the full-length DVD can be ordered.
Likewise if you’re a musician with CDs to sell, an author with books to sell, an artist with paintings or other artwork to sell, or a crafts maker with various crafts and such to sell. The musician might create a music video to promote his CDs; the author might read an excerpt from her book; the artist might produce a photo slideshow of his work; and the crafts maker might upload a short video walk-through of pieces she has for sale. Make sure you include details for how the additional product can be ordered, and let your placement on YouTube do the promotion for you.
As an example, Charles Smith Pottery offers a series of instructional videos on YouTube that demonstrate how to use a pottery wheel. Interested viewers can then access the accompanying website (detailed both in the video and in the video’s description) to learn more and to see what products the company has for sale.
Another example is t he San Francisco Electric Tour Company, which offers Segway tours of the San Francisco Bay Area. The company created an entertaining demo video about the Segway and their tours and then uploaded the video to YouTube. Interested people can view the video and then contact the firm to schedule a tour. It’s quite synergistic.
Then there’s John Pullum, a hypnotist and mind reader who provides corporate entertainment and motivational speeches. He’s uploaded videos of several of his appearances to YouTube; they’re both entertaining and informational regarding the services that he has to offer. Any viewer who likes what they see can then go to his website to learn more or to arrange an engagement.
The key is to create a video that people actually want to watch. That means something informative, useful, or entertaining. It can’t be a straight commercial, because people don’t like to watch commercials. It has to provide value to the viewer.
Once you get the viewer hooked, you lead him back to your website where your goods or services are for sale. It’s a two-step process watch the video, then go to the website to learn more or buy something. If your video is interesting enough, viewers will make the trip to your website to close the deal.
Shooting for YouTube: Proper Production Values
When you’re producing a video for YouTube, keep in mind that the video will be viewed in a small (320 x 240 pixel) window on the viewer’s computer monitor. It won’t be viewed on a high-definition widescreen TV; it won’t even be viewed on the full computer screen. No, your video has to be compelling when viewed in that small YouTube video window.
What this means is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on sophisticated video values. Skip the HDTV recording, skip the widescreen aspect ratio, may be even skip the ultra-expensive lights and makeup. Make your video good enough to be viewed at a 320 x 240 size, and don’t waste your money on production values that won’t be visible to the viewer.
In addition, keep that size in mind when deciding what to shoot. Don’t bother with crowd scenes; all those people will be too tiny to see in the small video window. Instead, compose an image that has maximum impact in the small window. What works best, more often than not, is a large subject against a simple background. That might be nothing more than the speaker full-frame against a light background; it’s a big image with good contrast, which is what you want.
You should, however, spend a few bucks for onscreen graphics. You want a title for your video, appropriate subtitles throughout, and your company’s phone number and website URL. These graphics need to look professional, and be large enough to read in the YouTube video window.
You can shoot a video for YouTube using professional video equipment, a consumer-level video camcorder (shooting in digital video format, of course), or even a computer webcam. Many video blogs are shot with simple webcams, just a person in front of the camera, talking about the subject at hand. You’ll probably want to transfer the video to a computer for editing, of course; any consumer-level video editing program, such as Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie, should do the trick.
As to length, YouTube lets you upload videos up to 10 minutes long. If you have a longer video say, a half-hour seminar on tape you can simply edit it into several shorter segments. In fact, shorter segments are generally better; I recommend keeping your videos to three minutes or less. Anything longer and you’ll start to bore people and lose viewers. Even if you have a 10-minute video, you might want to edit it into three or four 2- or 3-minute segments. YouTube viewers have a short attention span, and you need to compensate for this.
Uploading Your Videos to YouTube
The hardest part about uploading a video to YouTube is creating and editing the video. The uploading process itself is so simple a CEO can do it.
First, however, you have to make sure that your video file meets YouTube’s requirements, which are as follows:
- MPEG-4 format video with either the DivX or XviD codecs
- MP3 format audio
- 320[ts]240 resolution
- Frame rate of 30 frames per second (FPS)
- Length of 10 minutes or less
- File size of 100MB or less
If you shot your video with a digital camcorder or computer webcam, it’s probably in the right format to begin with, so there’s no conversion necessary. Your only concern is to stay within the length and file size limits.
To upload the video, click the Upload Videos link at the top right-hand corner of any YouTube page. This displays the Video Upload page; you now have a little paperwork to do.
First, enter a title for your video. Make sure it’s descriptive without being overly long. Next, enter a description for the video; this can and should be longer and more complete. (And don’t forget to include your phone number and website address in the description.)
Then enter one or more tags for the video, separating each tag by a space. Tags are keywords people use when searching; use as many tags as necessary to capture all possible search words and attract as many potential viewers as possible.
Now pull down the Video Category list and select a category for the video. Click the Upload a Video button when you’re ready to proceed.
Step two of the video upload process is where you specify the file you want to upload. Click the Browse button to open the Select File to Upload dialog box; navigate to and select the file you want and then click Open. This loads the filename into the File box on the Video Upload page.
With all of that done, the final step is to click the Upload Video button. YouTube finds the video on your hard disk and starts uploading it; the progress is shown on the Video Upload page. Once uploaded, take note of the video’s URL (to link to from your site and use in promotional material) and the embed code (to embed the video in your own website). Your video is now ready for viewing!
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The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world is constantly buzzing with the importance of great content, but it’s not always simple to recognize the kinds of content your site can build in order to be at the top of its field. Fortunately, I’ve got some suggestions:
Calculation, Analysis or Comparison Tools
An online tool that can assist users to compare products/services, calculate rates, money, time or other factors, or an analysis program that can check over documents, work, etc. can be an outstanding addition. It’s important to think like your visitors and imagine what types of information a tool could provide that would be worthful to them. It’s also critical to memorize that presentation and usability are as important as the actual information – make tools that run fast, display the results in a useable way and provide more than just information, but analysis and suggestions too.
Articles & Writing
Sometimes, the better content is just information that’s conclusive, authoritative and direct. Great writing takes practice, editing and effort, but the advantages are worthwhile – links & recognition from the online communities in your field are bound to follow an outstanding article. The blogosphere and several industry forums/communities have to see your work, so make sure to promote your content to these people and make it accessible.
Diagrams, Animation & Visual Content
Great content can be in visual appearance, and fantastic pictures, animations, charts & graphs can help to deliver a point in a way that simple writing often cannot. The key is to think regarding your audience and imagine yourself wishing for a diagram, illustration or animation that could accomplish your information needs goals. Don’t undervalue the value of aesthetics – they can go a long way towards making visual content successful – beauty breeds attention.
Interactive Elements
Online games, quizzes and customizable content can attract lots of attention. These interactive elements have to follow some basic rules. They need to be easy to use and easy to access (download). Macromedia’s Flash is a great way to present this sort of content because of its near-universal penetration of the e-market and relative speed of delivery. Games need to be entertaining, but shouldn’t be excessively complex – often the fun is in the simplicity. Quizzes shouldn’t necessarily be designed to challenge users; they can sometimes be better as an entertainment tool. Customization of products or build-your-own elements have to be useable – easy to figure out and quick to reward changes.
Using these elements can help to enhance your website’s content to greatness. If you discover yourself with a best-of-breed site, you can get additional recognition from awards. But, don’t be disappointed or discouraged if you don’t win, online competition is stiff.
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Several in the SEO world have long questioned the necessity of re-writing dynamic URLs, those that pull content from databases into static URLs that appear to end with a finite .php / .asp / .html / .cfm etc. A dynamic URL is often criticized by search engine optimizers because of the difficulties search engines have had indexing and reading them in the past.
At this time, however, Yahoo!, Bing, Google & Teoma all have dynamic pages in their index and in the top search engine result pages for many different searches. It would seem the issue with search engines has degraded. However, the usability matter of dynamic URLs still exists. From a user’s point of view a URL in the form of http://www.site.com/page.html is considerably friendlier than a URL written as http://www.site.com/page.php?ID=2&TAGformat=945bb399ls3.
No matter if it’s posting the URL to a website, sending it in an email, or save it on a notepad for later, the dynamic URL is something that is definitely unfriendly for users. The advantages of mod_rewrite and other tools that permit for the conversion of dynamic URLs into static ones may be lessened by the new abilities of the search engines, but they are not altogether gone.
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Who doesn’t want to get Top Ranking Positions in Google? 1st Page Placement in Google is NOT difficult, you need to follow Google Optimization Guidelines, and this Article has Summary of the Seven Fundamentals for Google Optimization.
Google optimization is about following Google guidelines, Google likes ethical SEO practices, those SEO practices which are to help website owners as well as Google and it has published guidelines for SEOs here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/seo.html
Top 7 Fundamentals for Google Optimization
- Fresh and Original Content
- Clean and Validated Code
- Easy and Accessible Navigation
- Good Interlinking of Web pages
- Healthy and Relevant Incoming Links
- Domain Age and Registered Period For
- Same Contacts at Site and Domain Registration
Fresh and Original Content
Google love fresh and original content on web page, selectable content/text copy of your web page, google can’t read content on images or at pics but if your website is completely based on images so there’s a solution for you, you can use your slogan on ALT tags.
e.g.; “<img src=”image source” alt=”Search Engine Submission | Submit Your Website on 100 Search Engines With a Single Click. “>
Clean and Validated Code
Clean and validate code helps google to crawl deeply, try to put content at the beginning of your web page, ignore nesting, javascript or comments, in fact try to shorten the text format with the help of external CSS.
Easy and Accessible Navigation
Text or image base navigation helps google to read, google bot can’t read javascript, dhtml, flash base navigation, try to avoid using these practices which google doesn’t like. Keep your navigation at top or left side of the web pages, make sure to add a sitemap page which will guide web surfers and web bots to read each and every page of your website, if you have huge website then make sure to add at least all main categories’ links at sitemap page.
Good Interlinking of Web pages
Web links are like roads and streets at website, make sure all website’s internal links are text base or image base, with relevant content.
Healthy and Relevant Incoming Links
Google likes referred websites, specially referred from quality and relevant resources. The more referrer links the more top rankings. Here one thing should be remembered that one relevant incoming links is better than hundred irrelevant links.
Domain Age and Registered Period For
Google started keeping new registered domains in sandbox since April 2004, in sandbox almost all new domains kept on probationary period for 6 to 8 months, in some cases for longer period, Sandbox domains don’t get good rankings.
Google also likes to rank better to those domains which are registered for longer period like for 5 or 10 years, because whoever registered domains for longer period shows how much s/he is serious with her/his business and most probably won’t do SPAM with those domains.
Same Contacts at Site and Domain Registration
Google likes true businessmen and a true businessman doesn’t misguide his website visitors, google likes those websites which have physical mailing address to their contact pages and google compares it with that physical mailing address which is used in domain registering.
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.
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Search engines don’t talk with websites directly, they use bots to communicate with websites, their bots come to websites and start reading the websites, whatever they read at websites they go back to search engines carrying the messages and store those messages in search engine’s database.
Search Engines are NOT Human Beings!
Search engines view websites with different prospects. They don’t have eyes to analyze beautiful colors and animations, don’t have ears to listen music and don’t have feelings to fall in love with your catchy slogans. Apart of all these disabilities they can evaluate your website better than a human being.
When you develop or going to get your website developed, what things you should keep in mind? Being website Owner you might think of website design and content, being Webmaster you might think of easy navigation and flexibility of website. You might be missing one very important aspects of search engine positioning, and that is how search engine is viewing your website?
What Things Search Engines Like at Your Website?
Good communication can increase the performance, it applies the same to search engines, if your website can communicate well enough to create good impression to search engines, your website will be facilitating with high rankings then, here is a list of elements search engines like.
- Validated and Optimize Code
- Rich Content
- Unique URL of Each Webpage
- Plain URLs
- Proper Internal Linking
- Healthy Incoming Links
- Text Based Navigation
- Neat Table Structure
- Good Directory and File Structure
- Proper Headings, Subheadings, Captions
- Title, Meta Tags and Alt Tags
- Robots.txt
What Things Search Engines Dislike at Your Website?
Take care of the elements which can hurt your view to search engines, thought each search engine has its own criteria of viewing websites but all major search engines dislike these mentioned elements.
- Broken Links
- Invalid Code
- JavaScript
- Orphan Links, Images and Files
- Under-construction Page/es
- Pop ups
- Redirectors
- IP Tracking
- Dynamically Generated Pages
- Frames
- Same Background and Font Colors
- Multi Nested Table Structure
Search engine bots crawl website with different time frame period, it depends upon how frequently your website updates? Each search engine has its own time frequency to crawl websites, now you know what things do matter to search engines, take care of them so that your website can delivery its message well enough to get top rankings.
Best of luck 
About The Author
Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.
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Search engine optimization effort can be categorized into three basic elements “Code, Content and Linking (CCL)” these three diverse elements play very important role in search engine rankings, you will come to know about their effectiveness and usability with some of the very useful tips in this article.
| Code |
Content |
Linking |
| Writing Code |
Content Writing |
Internal linking |
| Validating Code |
Formatting |
Incoming or Inbound linking |
| Cleaning & Optimization Code |
Content Placement |
Anchor linking |
| Cross Brower Independence |
Content Distribution |
Navigation |
| Robots.txt and sitemap |
Content Updating |
Site Structuring |
Code
Code of the website is the very first element that is unfortunately ignored by most SEOs, website code allows search engines bots to go through the webpage, and if bots will not be able to understand code they will not be able to access content of the webpage because content is kept within code, this is enough to tell you about the importance of website code.
Code of the website has to be clean and optimized, here i means that code like JavaScripts or CSS should be called externally, try to keep your code as short as possible and ignore too much nesting.
You must validated complete website code either everything is working fine or not, check for browser compatibility, orphan pages and broken links, don’t forget to have robots.txt and sitemap.
Content
Content is still king, no one can deny the fact that since the revolution of search engine in mid 90s, content is undefeated king. Content needs special treatment, today search engines automatically take keywords within content, they become more conscious about content, they follow basic fundamentals of writing techniques, such as headings, sub-headings, bullets & numbered, inverted commas.
Now it’s up to you either you are successfully able to give an impression of your important keywords to search engines, try to use your important keywords in headings, sub-headings and try to start paragraphs with important keywords.
Note: – Here content means selectable content, content on images can’t be selected and read by search engine bots.
Linking
Linking is one of the most important criteria to get better rankings in search engines specially in google. Linking is divided into two categories onsite linking and offsite linking. Onsite linking belongs to links that are mentioned at your web-domain either they are internal or external it doesn’t matter, they have to be declare at your website (domain). Offsite linking belongs to links that point your web-domain from a different web-domain, they are inbound or incoming links to your website (domain).
In internal linking you should try to keep web pages as close as possible to root, if you have a big site of over 100 pages or 500 pages then you have to make relevant directories and keep relevant pages in them.
In link-building you have to keep few things in mind that link has to be one way, and link title and description should be very focus, try to have incoming links from relevant sites, since one relevant link is equal to 100 irrelevant links, when submitting to directories, go as deep as possible and try to find most relevant category where you can submit your site.
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There is a misconception related to dynamic websites that dynamic websites are not search engine friendly or they can’t have good positions in major search engines. This is absolutely wrong, dynamic websites can have better and more controlled positions in search engines comparatively than static websites.
What is a dynamic website?
A dynamic website is database driven website in which parts of the content are generated by Server Side Programs/ Middle Tier.
Dynamic webpage doesn’t physically exist as a file/document on (hosting) server, unless the request comes for a webpage. The request contains parameters, user identities, date & time, context etc.
Problems with Dynamic Websites according to Search Engines
This is true that search engines are not good at reading dynamic web pages, but there is always a solution for any problem, first you need to understand that why search engines are unable to read dynamically generated websites? What hurts them not to read dynamic web pages?
- Dynamic webpage doesn’t physically exit on server
- Dynamic website has complex URLs such as “ http://www.wahidqazi.com?name=value&blabla%blabla@session_id@2226897&blabla=77
- Search engine bots/crawlers usually have difficulty in reading these characters “?”, “=”, “@”, “%”, “$”, “*”, “&”, “!” in URLs
- Search engine usually considers dynamic website as group of never ending links
- Search engine bots/crawlers might get stuck in an infinite loop, specially if the dynamic webpage has session id
Tips to Optimize Dynamic Websites
Now you know what hurts search engine bots/crawlers to index your website? What you need to know is that how you can keep your valuable website indexed by search engines, the more your web pages are indexed the better your website will impress search engines
- Create an HTML sitemap with 100 text links or less. If you have more than 100 links, break the sitemap into more than one web pages
- Google Sitemap will also be an advantage, specially if your website is big and dynamic
- Get inbound links deep into your website from other relevant websites such as directories, classified directories, vertical industrial portals
- Convert dynamic web pages into static web pages with the help of URL re-writing techniques
- You can use some plug-in applications that will change your existing dynamic URLs into static ones, specially for shopping carts there are plenty of applications available
- Avoid using session IDs in the URL, specially when user has not logged in
- If you do need to include parameters, limit it to two and limit the number of characters per parameter to ten or less
- If you do have small dynamic website and enough time you can apply this technique. Just right click on page by page of you website, copy the source code and create new static page with .htm or .html extensions
URL Rewriting Techniques and Tools
A rewrite engine is a piece of web server software application that is used to modify URLs before fetching the requested items for a variety of purposes.
Rewrite Engine for Apache HTTP server:
Apache HTTP server has a rewrite engine called mod_rewrite, which has been described as “the Swiss Army knife of URL manipulation”
Rewrite engines for Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS):
- IISRewrite from Qwerksoft
- ISAPI_Rewrite from isapirewrite.com
- URL Replacer from Motobit
- Ionic’s ISAPI Rewrite Filter (IIRF) (open source) from Ionic Shade
Rewrite HttpModule for Microsoft ASP.NET:
- URLRewriting.NET
Rewrite engine for Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Servlet container servers:
- Apache Tomcat, Resin, Orion etc)
- HttpRedirectFilter (open source)
- UrlRewriteFilter (open source) – allows you to rewrite URLs before they get to your Servlets, JSP’s, Struts etc
- URL Rewriter (open source – LGPL) – URL Rewriter is a tool for rewriting URLs in Java Servlets. It is similar to mod_rewrite
Conclusion:
Dynamic websites are not impossible to optimize, it’s just a small fine tune that you need to keep in mind when developing a dynamic website, if you can understand the problems search engine bots/ crawlers have to face when crawling your website, you can better prepare your website, so that search engine bots/crawlers can easily index your valuable website.
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