It is very tempting to upgrade your static site to an SEO friendly dynamic site but there are a few specific things that you should consider before you go ahead with your idea. Typically, a dynamic site is far more appealing in comparison to a standard website with an old HTML code.
However, there is still need to consider a few points and know more about these dynamic sites and SEO before you start because a transition from HTML to dynamic sites involves a lot of work.
You will also find more than one vendor come up to you and say that there is no more problem with SEO and dynamic sites. Beware of such vendors who insist that Googlebot can read JavaScript. In fact, it is much contrary to that.
You may have heard about Angular.js that was invented by Google. Well, this alone does not have the capability to make a site SEO friendly just by itself and right out of the box. This is because HTML is still the native language of Googlebot and no matter what the platform is, it will need a lot of translation just to unpack and understand all the scripts correctly.
Know about the pitfalls
Ideally, irrespective of the hype regarding dynamic SEO sites, there are a few typical pitfalls involved in the process that makes these sites very difficult to optimize. Therefore, you must first be aware of these pitfalls and know what you are getting. You will need to follow a definite guideline for this such as:
- Asking if the links run on JavaScript because Google cannot crawl it
- Knowing whether the implementation will work with your CDN and
- Inquiring about the types of pages that cannot be accessed by spiders.
Also ask an SEO Expert about how a site includes category pages that are pulled together by the search function which once again cannot be accessed by crawlers. Therefore, Google will not be able to see the details of individual products or crawl any links off these pages.
You may also ask your programmer as to how the platform will respond to the Analytics tags that will help in providing the right answer. You will be surprised to see that the Analytics, Tag Manager, Trusted Stores, Remarketing Tags multiplying remarkably when you click through different pages on one site.
Moreover, the home page in each of these sites will usually have two of these on the category page and three on the product page. This is because it will keep all the previous tags live every time the dynamic site creates a new page.
For this reason you must check your old site to see whether there are any special types of pages that cannot be 301 redirected to a new site. If you find it so, just imagine what will happen to these pages on the new dynamic site.
About the dynamic URLs
You will have to change the structure of the URL as well to make it more dynamic and make sure that it is SEO friendly. For this, you will need to plan very carefully for the redirects from your old site to the new dynamic site.
- Ideally, the CDN and your product feed should take care of the current products but you should not ignore your old product pages that contain links and receive traffic and at the same time may have a pretty good rank among the search engines. Ignoring them will lead to a situation where you will have one too many 404 pages.
- The best way to redirect your pages is to get your SEO team map the old URLs into new URLs. This however is a tedious process and expensive as well but will surely be much less than the cost of a badly mapped URL.
- Also make sure that remapping is not done till the time you have tested the new URLs thoroughly. For this, you should crawl the URLs into the test environment and look at the test results very carefully to identify any anomaly.
Mostly it is seen that a product page contains a FAQ added in the end along with the URL. This will not make your site dynamic in any ways but will surely result in hundreds of 404 pages.
Even if you add sub-folders and replace the good URLs with ugly looking hash-banged URLs post-launch you will have no results in creating final redirects from your old site to the new one.
Ideally, these issues will inadvertently create redirect chains and therefore it is important that you know how to implement different self-canonical tags to your pretty URLs in place prior to the launch. This way, only the pretty URLs will get indexed even if something breaks and the product URLs is replaced suddenly.
Conduct several tests
Lastly make sure that while it is still in the development stage you must make sure that you test your dynamic site. You may do this by setting up and using the Google Search Console account. You may also use the Fetch or Render feature to see which parts exactly of the CDN delivered and dynamic pages the Googlebot cannot see. This will give your SEO team enough access to the development site so that they can test and check different and specific SEO issues.
To make sure that your new dynamic site scores 100 on the Google page speed test run it through Google Page Speed Tool post-launch. Ideally, you will find that it will not score above 60. This is because it may need to optimize images, fix other issues and minify codes with the help of the render blocking scripts.
Lastly and most importantly, if you are into lot of social media sharing then you must set up a private Twitter account and a Facebook page to test the Open Graph tag implementation. If you see that Facebook cannot read the tags properly and reflects a blank space of the size of an image, use other micro-data after testing.
About the author
Jeffrey Donald has a lot of knowledge regarding SEO Design and can provide a lot of SEO Expert solutions. You can implement one of his designs to achieve the best results in internet marketing with better SEO and marketing strategies that will increase ranks, reach and revenue.
