The Best for SEO Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (aka Yahoo!
Store)
Yahoo Merchant Solutions, also known as Yahoo Store, has been
around since the 90's. It continues to grow with small business owners having
great success selling online. Many of these Yahoo! Stores are selling 500,000 to
millions a year in annual e-commerce sales. Why so successful? Well, we can start off by saying that Yahoo Merchant Solutions is the
most complete platform for building an e-commerce website. Along
with the 24 hour support and a list of professional developers, you have all
the tools you need to launch your business and become a success. One major
reason for the success of this platform has to do with the static pages
generated when a store is published.
Static Pages vs. Dynamic Pages. Which is better for
SEO?
Many e-commerce platforms create dynamic pages (pages
that changes dynamically). Dynamic pages can change every time they are loaded
(without you having to make those changes) and they can change their content
based on what the user does, like clicking on text or an image. One of the most
common types of dynamic web pages is the database driven type. This means that
you have a web page that grabs information from a database (the web page is
connected to the database by programming) and inserts that information into the
web page each time it is loaded. If the information stored in the database
changes, the web page connected to the database will also change accordingly and
automatically, without human intervention.
A typical “URL” for a dynamic page might look like this:
http://www.acommonwebsite.com/prodcat=12?id=2?s=123456789
Disadvantages to dynamic pages:
According to Google's webmaster guidelines, some search engine spiders
do not even crawl dynamic pages. This means that if all you have is dynamic page
content on your site, you will be missing out on some, if not a lot, of search
engine listings.
What are Static Pages?
In a nutshell, static web pages (normal pages you build)
always look the same and the content never changes unless you load a new page or
you change the page yourself and upload the new version of the pages onto the
server. A static web page contains content that displays the same way each time
the page is requested from a browser. An example of a static web page is a help
page that contains contact information (such as return policy or "brick and
mortar" store locations) that does not change frequently.
A static store page is created using only HTML. Static store
pages can contain HTML tags and text. They can also contain other elements suitable for the
page, such as images and animation, but they do not make use of the information
in the database.
Better SEO with Yahoo! Store
A Yahoo Store interior page is "static". These pages are not
pulled from a database as you browse the site. The content on the pages is
static when the search engines crawl the website. This is important because it
is easier for search engines to index a website that has static pages, as
compared to dynamic sites with many parameters.
Example of the URL of a static site
http://acommonyahoostore.com/basketballs.html
Conclusion:
When making a decision on a whether to choose a website
platform that produces static or dynamic pages, take into consideration how the
search engines view and index your site. Yahoo Store is one of the only
platforms available that continue the success of e-commerce with RTML
programming to the output of static html pages. The pages that search engines love to crawl
and index!
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