Search Engine Optimisation Questions

[satin]

Just a few quick questions about SEO:


How do spiders cope with dynamic sites ? If my site refers to pages like this - 'page.cfm?catID=123' - will the search engines pick this up ? If not, how do I get around this . . . . ?
Is it wise to have different titles/meta tags for every page ?
If the above is wise, is it a good idea to make the title/metatags dynamic ?
'alt' and/or 'title' tags for images ?
Does the way the page is built server side really matter ? i.e. if the 'header' is included in every page or a generic page includes 'header', 'footer', 'content' etc. ?


Any guidance would be much appreciated

[Chris Locke]

Spiders work with dynamic links, but it depends if your site changes. ie, if all your links point to index.php?view=news, but then you change to ASP, all your links will be dead. If you keep to 'search engine friendly' links (/news/) then it doesn't matter what is behind the scenes, as your website will give them the right page. If that makes sense.

The titles / meta tags should be relevant for the page, and shouldn't contain extra tags 'just in case it gets spidered'. Ideally, anyway. Therefore, they may indeed be different across your site.

As for the "does the way the page is built matter?" no, as the spider sees the finished HTML page, and won't know / care how its built.

I don't think alt / title tags for images are needed for spiders (as they mainly concentrate on page content) but its essential practice for accessability purposes. Screen-readers for example use them.

[satin]

Thanks Chris.

The content on the site rarely changes (at least the links don't change). It's basically a shopping site so products in categories . . . . I'm going to be making it as 'visible' as possible and then going through ALL the hoops to get it up in the rankings. . . .