Optimizing Dynamic Websites

With technological advancement, web 2.0 web applications are being developed every day and static websites are no longer just simply static, they are either migrated to dynamic websites using PHP, ASP, JSP and other programming languages to provide customized contents to users and also rich interaction or static websites are made more interactive by adding elements like flash banners to impart very interactive look to your website. These dynamic websites have provided user interaction by providing interface for users, eBay online auction store, Amazon book store; Yahoo stores are live examples which let users do real time shopping by creating accounts online, place orders, check their account status and swipe cards for payment – everything is secure online. Ecommerce storefront development, portal development, b2b osCommerce development have mobilized are life and making everything possible over internet.

Now coming to these dynamic websites visibility, these web sites should be search engine friendly but it is really difficult to make these dynamic websites search engine friendly.

What led to need of creating dynamic websites???

With growing need to sell products and services online for global reach and visibility in very short span of time websites are developed and internet proved the best tool for promotion of your business. Selling services through static websites is not a hard nut to crack but coming to selling thousands of products online developers started finding difficulty. Dynamic websites are web sites whose web pages are generated on fly and provide interactive experience to users. Web pages have interactive navigation and generated on demand in comparison to static websites where web pages navigation are just hyperlink based. Static websites are easily indexable by major search engines but dynamic websites are not easily indexed by search engines. With the point to sell products online, ecommerce storefront are developed providing user interactive interface, this virtual online store provides real time shopping interface to its customers. It is not easy to develop a static website to promote thousands of products and manage those pages, as this requires creating unique pages for every product.

These dynamic websites to create interactivity use either server side scripting or client side scripting languages. Dynamic web pages are created on fly, many web pages really do not exist on the server, on demand they are created when a user generates a query and if the site is database driven, query string is manipulated and then this string pulls the web page from the database and they do not physically exist and thus are not indexed by search engine. It is not really easy to index these websites, but there are few important ways to optimize these websites for search engines.

URL Rewriting: Dynamic web pages URLs are query strings with delimiters like question mark; also these URLs are very long and have encoded variables generated by scripting languages. These links are generated and modified by scripting language by adding a session id to the generated URLs to keep away users from blocking the cookies, these session ids are unique for every visit of Google. Still many search engines do not index these dynamic web pages, the search engine spider get lost in loops. You need to manually rewrite these URLs by removing special characters, symbols and variables like - ?!= these. Some open source content management systems have modules for URL rewriting. Example: Joomla generates search engine friendly URLs and provides page caching mechanism. CGI/Perl script is another way for getting your site indexed by search engines. Query part of dynamically generated URLs is assigned variable that returns a search engine friendly URLs that are easily indexed by search engine crawlers.

Creating a static site map for your dynamic website: Make sure that your websites’ dynamically generated all web pages are linked to the static sitemap page and submit this static web page to search engines and directories.

Other is URL re-write module will help your dynamic website to be indexed by search engines but again it depends on the server your website is hosted. For Apache server mod-rewrite scripting module helps to modify your URL in search engine friendly format. For IIS windows based server ISAP rewrite program is used.

Turning off link appendage, PHP.ini file, will instruct server to turn off user session id and only switch on cookies session id (session.use_trans_sid and turn on session.use_only_cookies). This can also be achieved by writing .HTACCESS file and adding "php_flag session.use_trans_sid Off" and php_flag session.use_only_cookies On.

Most important what I want to discuss with you about ecommerce websites are server authentication. .htpasswd and .htaccess are two files that will let you password protect your web pages on server and keep your information safe and secure.

.htpasswd file should be placed anywhere other that directory of the website and its path is defined as /etc/apache2/.htpasswd as it is used to keep user login and password of website’s users.

.htaccess file contains access information of the website users and their rights and are placed in the root of website directory.

Now let me come to some of the most important issues - the speed of loading and low overhead for a dynamic web page. Load balancing, bandwidth management, security, encryption are some of the other important issues which we need to consider before creating a dynamic website.

On demand constructed web pages take more response time and also server has to take extra at the time of on-demand page generation. Performance and scalability are most important issues that have risen with these dynamic websites. It is also calculated that server-side latency accounts for 40 percent of the total page delivery time experienced by end users.

To speed up dynamic web pages construction at server side we need to consider dynamic page pre-generation, fragment caching and code caching.