This session according to the Conference schedule should cover all the SEO tactics possible for your dynamic site, including global site optimization tactics, page titles, metadata, page headings, content, keyword embedded URLs, page rank, sitemaps, feeds, and much more. But will this be enough?

Is global site optimization enough to score a top ten ranking for a competitive term, or is something more specific required? What if you do all these things are in place and it’s still not enough to get a listing into the top 50 much less the top 5?

The speakers were Ralph Tegtmeier, Mikkel deMib Svendsen and Kristjan Mar Hauksson.

First up was Mikkel, saying that Search Engines’s want to index everything they can find so you need to make sure that they can find your site and access it without problems.

Ideally, we should want:

• our site to get indexed
• out site to get ranked
• our site to get traffic and lastly
• we need action from a user

To do all of this, our sites need to be set up correctly and we need to look the user perspective in terms of their needs and also what you want to say or sell and how you are going to set it up and present it to the user.

Not everyting is a problem (meaning that it is possible to do all the following)

• databases cannot be searched so you need to be sure that the content in DB’s can be accessed on the page
• Question-marks (?) is mainly not a problem
• SSI is not a problem
• Extension names are not a problem. As long a proper HTML is presented

Directly related issues for site inaccessability

• long & ugly URL’s
• duplicate content
• spider traps – infinate loops
• server downtime and slow response

Indirect issues for site accessability

• required support for cookies, JavaScript and Flash
• geo-targeting and personalization
• form based navigation

Ralph was up next and talked about optimizing on-site links. He said that Google PageRank applies to all link types – external inlinks, external outlinks AND on-site links.

If your site on-site links are not optimized, then your page will go to Supplemental Results, or omitted resutls, or orphaned pages, or broken links. You may lose ranking and traffic due to non-optimal on-site linking structure – you might not even be aware of it.

The Solution is to anylise your site and work through all your on-site links to fix it.

Look at:

• usability
• logical navigation flow
• design or look-and-feel
• maintenance issues
• CMS issues

CMS problems include

• Not able to create or optimize Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
• Dynamic URL – not able to do rewrites