Dynamic Web Pages

There are two types of websites that can be found online: dynamic and static. Static pages stay the same no matter what. No user can personalize these sites, nor are there any options to do so. Every visitor to that site sees the same information. In order to find new information on a static page, the user must navigate through links. Static pages are based on hypertext language and there’s nothing wrong with having static pages. In fact, sometimes static pages are all a particular website needs in order to convey their information.

Dynamic pages, on the other hand, enhance the user’s experience online. Dynamic pages change with the user. They can be personalized, changed, and updated constantly. Databases can feed information to the site directly without having any human contact, thus allowing the site to show the latest information. Dynamic pages can be used to show shopping preferences and for shopping carts in online stores. These carts contain all the items a visitor wishes to buy, then stores this information for the visitor in case they leave the site. Dynamic pages can work through cookies, databases housed on servers, or a combination of those elements. Here are some dynamic elements commonly found on websites:

Forms that allow a page to change in response to the information entered into those forms. This can include quizzes and other “check mark” type forms.Sites that interactively link the user to music, pictures, and videos, like pages prepared in Flash.Sites that run PHP, JavaScript, DHTML, or other dynamic web languages.

Search engines have a hard time with dynamic content. For example, search engines won’t crawl dynamic URL’s, which are URL’s that contain characters like ?, .cgi, cgi-bin, %, and other characters. They also won’t index JavaScript in most cases, though they will often take a cursory look at the code. Search engines definitely won’t index Flash sites, as they can’t read the Flash language. This is a shame because Flash is a great way for some sites to use a dynamic interface.

The limitations of search engine spiders do not prevent sites from using dynamic pages, however. Using a dynamic interface isn’t necessarily problematic, as long as certain precautions are taken. For instance, a Webmaster who creates a Flash site should offer the exact same page in a non-Flash version for users who choose not to run Flash on their computers. Also, by providing non-dynamic links and providing others with non-dynamic links to the site, website owners can increase the likelihood that their site will gain in rank.

Robots.txt Files

Robots.txt files direct search engine traffic and help direct search engines to the right place. The file extension “.txt” is a text file format generally used for unformatted text. Simple programs like Notepad can be used to create and read .txt files.

In general, the robots.txt file is a .txt file that sits in the main root directory of a website site. So, for example, this file would probably look like http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt. The purpose of this file is to direct search engine spider traffic, specifically by excluding information from a page. Why would anyone want to exclude any of their website from a search engine? If someone had an experimental site, a secret site, or a site that uses language that a search engine spider can’t read, they might direct the spider away from those pages using the robots.txt file. For great information on building and maintaining these types of files, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/, a site devoted to web robots.