Welcome to the Escape Blog

I did a report on a website this morning and I am excited as I know there is a lot we can do with it. One of the biggest problems I found with the website was the way the data was fed into the website from a product database.

Basically, this customer sells lots of products that are registered in their back office solution, which sends the data to the website in catalogue format.

They want to be found in search engines for the specific products they sell - and they are specific. Sounds great in terms of search as long as the pages are tagged correctly and can be indexed.

But, we came across a problem. The back-end database serves product data to the web pages in an okay format (could be better) but, the only way to access the product pages on the website is by doing a product search from a home page feature.

No Links

So, when a search engine spider comes along, trying hard to follow any link it can swallow up… it can’t find any links into the product pages and so can’t index them, unless they are linked to manually externally and even then they don’t link to each other.

Each valuable commodity - the product pages - were like islands. One way in only with restricted access.

Realistically, this isn’t necessarily anything the client should have known about but it does create a big problem in terms of search potential.

Imagine giving out a brochure to a client where the introductory pages are clear but all the product pages (the actual content) are glued together.

Fixing The Problem

A simple plug and socket job into the database pulling out a list of all the products and placing them into a static HTML ‘index’ web page that is linked to from the static parts of the website.

Voilá, linkable pages and lots of quality (meat and potatoes) content.