Looking around it seems to me that a database person can get a great site up and running, full of products or information, but the Search Engine Optimisation is lacking, i.e. often the TITLES and DESCRIPTIONS are the same on every page.
I am going to set up a new website that has the following requirements:

1. Owner of store can make updates to products.
2. The 'HEAD' TITLE and DESCRIPTION are automatically generated to reflect the information that is on each page.
3. The pages generated are SE friendly, that is, without too much "?" "=" etc. in the file name, or the file names are HTML.
4. I (the Webguy) don't know PHP language and don't have the time to learn right now
5. Possible use of payment system in the future (PayPal probably)

I have looked at osCommerce, PHP Nuke, some CMS systems (Mambo, WebGUI) but it appears that there is some modification needed (PHP), which outta my realm. I have available MySQL.

I guess I am looking for an "all-in-one" website product that can offer 100 products with each one showing an optimised page for the search engines. Is that too much to ask? Are we there yet?

Your thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated - thanks tons!

Alan

Most catalogue/cart sites are pretty much SE unfriendly without some major mods needed. Written by programmers for programmers. Not many have ever had any input from anyone who understood what it needs for SE Friendly catalogues
It's one reason I decided to write my own (in ASP though).

You might want to look at www.applepiecart.com It's not a cheap option though as it's a hosted cart.

I do something a little different with my database driven websites... Let's say I have the content for someone's catalog or other database divided up into these fields title, description, price, category, shortdescription, keywords, etc..... I'll call all this info above the head of the page then just drop those variables into the head in the title tags and also meta keywords. Seems to work just fine.. when I allinurl:mysite.com at google I get sometimes up to 50 results form the same page, all with different page titles and content. ROCK ON!

You can buy a custom solution from me with what you need but it ain`t goona be cheap .
And nothing is automated in that direction .

No software can do SEO as a skilled coder . Throwing keywords with no meaning on a apage will not get you anywhere anymore .

of course "throwing keywords" on a page will not produce results... however, page titles which describe relevant content selectively seeded with keywords... now you're getting somewhere... Add link popularity by getting links from external sites and you're doing even better. Google's (does anyone else's count? no) search algorhytm is very dynamic, and by applying the above mentioned technique, you can do very well in its searches. I've got several sites in the top 10 and a few at #1 for the desired keywords by simply making my page content relevant, sharing links, and having a number of unique descriptive page titles. There are a few little tricks involving placement of code (google reads top to bottom, too) and using things such as alt tags to describe images, but really there is no "voodoo" and no one of these tricks alone will get you in the top 10. Google provides a lot of infomation about their search engine, and also advise on avoiding so called "search engine optimizers" - Here's the URL:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/about.html

To stay relevant on the thread, dynamic pages, as i mentioned before, are very easy to configure for maximum placement in google. Google does say that they "limit" listing dynamic pages as to no overload webservers, but I have yet to see a dynamic page on mine be omitted.

Hi,

I don't think you can do this without learning php, anyway I wish you good luck


Leonardos