My firm currently has a web store with 320.000 products.  The store is blocked from search engines by the hosting firm.

I intend to develop a content only site to link to the store to allow search engines to find us.

The only thing is with a constantly changing product list of this magnitute it needs to be database driven.

What does it take to do this in a way that search engines will see the content with dynamic pages?

Do I have to generate static pages?

Are there any templates or tools designed to accomplish this?

To see our site visit www(dot)ashlin(dot)ca

Database driven websites and web-based stores are, potentailly, 100% SEO friendly

You have to make sure that the pages that the 'system' spews out are accessible via unique URLs (ie using GET methods, rather than POST) and that the html (when doing view source) is unique to each URL

Having looked at the site above, i'll also tell you to avoid frames.

Removing frames, i can see these very spiderable urls (for example, just 3)

[https://cam.channelonline.com/ashlin/storesite/Search/External/]
[https://cam.channelonline.com/ashlin/storesite/Search/Category/?search_string=&search|cat=AC]
[https://cam.channelonline.com/ashlin/storesite/Products/index.co?id=M000005911]

Then make sure the head secton is uinque (title and meta tags)

alindzon wrote:

The store is blocked from search engines by the hosting firm.

Assuming that you are talking about the above site then this comment is complete bullshit. If I can see it, then a search engine can.

Research some basic onsite SEO and then start a link building campaign.

There's no need for an another site to drive traffic in, just drive traffic from the SEs to the site you've already got

For full SE friendliness I'd also recommend removing the http to https redirect on all pages that don't require that level of security

alindzon wrote:

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to me.

My comment about the site being blocked from spiders was based on what CNET told me.  They host thousands of stores for technology resellers and their policy is to prevent any of them from being crawled.

My frames structure was to allow me to control the top banner of the site while still using their store.

My plan is to keep the frames for the store, but to develop a new series of pages with static content as well as active content mimicking the content of the store.  My plan is to replace the default page with a nicer less dynamic page that promotes our firm, links to the store with a login or new cusotmer box, and gives us a place to promote services etc..

The reason I plan to create some new dynamic pages is to allow search engines to crawl the over 300,000 products which we sell, since they cannot be indexed in the store itself according to cnet..

On further inspection of your site I can see that google is aware of about 57 of your URLs, but not the content.
In the source of your pages there is the tag

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>

If you're able to remove this then do so

alindzon wrote:

I have not been able to find anything that clearly has examples of dynamic pages that are SEO friendly.  For example could I develop a single page where you enter a search phrase, keyword, or part number, and it returns all the items in the database that match that phrase?  Would that be SEO friendly?

Yes.

However, the input required to get this new site to the level you want is almost as much as creating your own store from scratch.

alindzon wrote:

I just don't know where to start with this, except that I know that the pages I develop or have developed should idealy be unframed, and without flash.

I would appreciate any further input.

One thing I will say now is that the cnet hosted store is already dynamic.

My worry at the moment is that you do not know the difference between dynamic and non-dynamic content and what is and is not seo friendly

Basically:

Any web page, no matter how it is generated, that produces raw html (you can see this by doing view > source) can be SEO friendly.

the first steps are to get it on a web host and get the pages served to anyone who wants to see them (including search engines)

Then make sure you have internal links around your page (ie using <a href='..'>some text</a> and not something like <span onclick='newWindow('...')'>Something here</span>)

You can then research SEO in all its forms so you can tweak and promote your site to your hearts content.

with database driven websites there are some easy-to-make SEO mistakes, such as:

URLs that confuse the search engines by having too many variables in them
Accidental duplicate content as a result of url variables in a different order
uniform meta tags
duplicate content as a result of bulky templates

My advice:

Get a cheapish webhost offering php and mysql (somewhere between $7 and $20 /month) preferably running on linux/apache

Download and install an open source shopping cart solution (eg OScommerce, zenCart etc) and build yourself your own store - that you have control over

there are a myriad of payment integration solutions from google to paypal with many more in between