One of the first things I learned about building a web site was the difference between static sites and dynamic sites. Though I’m not a programmer, I’ll try to do my best to explain the difference between the two and why static pages are crucial to SEO…

Static pages are pages that you create that don’t include any code that will make the content of the page change. For example, your standard old HTML web page is a static page. A dynamic page, on the other hand, is database driven. Dynamic pages are pages that are built by pieces pulled from different tables in a database that come together to form a page; they are built on-the-fly and they don’t really exist as pages within the web sites directory. They use more advanced code such ASP or PHP. Webcrawlers like the googlebot, can’t/don’t crawl pages that don’t exist.

One of the other benefits to a static web site is the url. The url for a static page uses the file name of the web page which you determine. This will allow you to put keywords for the page in the url. Dynamic pages, conversely, contain long query strings that don’t really describe the page. As an example, here is a page that uses a static, seo-friendly url, and here is a page that uses a dynamic url.

To prove that the url is a factor in determining the web pages’ relevancy, do a search for extension cable in google and notice that google bolds the keywords in the url of each of the sites listed.

If you have a dynamic site and none of your pages are getting indexed, switch to static pages or you’ll be fighting an uphill battle just to get your pages indexed, let alone ranking well in the search engines.