Introducing Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Most search engines have trouble dealing with dynamic pages such as the ones used by WebSphere Commerce. This fact is verified by a review of notes on google webmaster help center. In a section on “Does Google index dynamic pages?”, it is stated that google can index dynamic pages - but these pages can cause problems for the crawler and may be ignored. The same note suggests using static copies of the pages for the crawler. Websphere commerce by default uses dynamic links for all the categories and products. It is impossible for a large commerce site to create a static copy of every product and category in its arsenal.

How does WebSphere Commerce address this issue?

Starting from WCS 5.5, a new component called URLMapperConfig is made available to commerce users. This component helps translate a dynamic url to a static url. For example, consider the link to CategoryDisplay page:
CategoryDisplay?storeId=10001&categoryId=10001&catalogId=10001&langId=-1

When this component is enabled and a relevant mapper xml file is used, the same category display page can be accessed using this static url(SEO Link):
category_10001_10001_10001_-1.

About the Separator:

  1. Note that the parameters are now separated by a separator ‘_’ and the parameter names are not in use any more. The actual translation of this static link into something that the command/view understands takes place through an adapter.
  2. The separator in the example is ‘_’. This separator can be replaced with some other character. Apart from ‘_’ other suitable character include ‘|’ and ‘/’.
  3. One significant downside of using a separator such as ‘_’ is that the parameter values themselves should not have a ‘_’ character in them. We have to keep in mind this consideration when we select a parameter separator.

Dynamic vs Static links:

  1. In a websphere commerce site both dynamic and SEO links can co-exist. This is important during the process of flattening the jsp pages. Because, it may not be physically possible or necessary to convert every page to use SEO link for every SEO enabled product or category. Therefore only those pages that are critical for interfacing with the search engines will be SEO enabled. This works fine in the WebSphere Commerce Environment.
  2. There is a subtle difference in the way a dynamic page and a SEO page is called. In a dynamic call, the order of the parameters is not important. But in the case of an SEO page, the SEO page must always be called in the same way.
  3. Another difference between an SEO link and a dynamic link is about the varying number of parameters expected during the calling of a page. This forces us to use different SEO links for different settings. Although there are only two key commands - CategoryDisplay and ProductDisplay commands - the way a command is called, that is the number of parameters used, determines whether it is a candidate SEO link. Thus we end up with more number of SEO links than just the two.

Conclusion:
Implementing SEO on the site significantly increases the chances of the site pages being found during searches from various search engines. A very effective strategy includes a combination of strong Meta data information in the pages displayed to the client, search engine friendly URLs and a powerful site map that allows a web spider to crawl all the important areas of the site. Additional analysis have to be performed periodically to study of the effectiveness of SEO. Other areas of SEO effectiveness include Page Title Recommendations, SEO Page Tuning and Alt Tag Recommendations.

Leave a Comment