[RESOLVED] Please help with title and page descriptions

80_20

I'm not a programmer, I'm in sales. A web designer is telling me that the web site he is developing for me is in dynamic php.
I want to place specific descriptions for titles, pages and images to improve the chances of search engine marketing.
Some 3000 companies details will be listed and I am told that descriptions for individual companies will not be able to be customised as the text will be generated dynamically. Surely individual entries can be accommodated.
Is there away to over come this or is it a ploy to generate further business on his behalf for search engine optimisation?

bradgrafelman

80/20;10994023 wrote:
A web designer is telling me that the web site he is developing for me is in dynamic php.

Er, what in the world is that supposed to mean? That's like saying I'm building you a dynamic automobile because it will move. 🙂

80/20;10994023 wrote:
Some 3000 companies details will be listed and I am told that descriptions for individual companies will not be able to be customised as the text will be generated dynamically. Surely individual entries can be accommodated.
Is there away to over come this or is it a ploy to generate further business on his behalf for search engine optimisation?

We don't have nearly enough information to be able to even come close to answering this. How are the details listed? How are they stored? How is the output being generated (again, "dynamically" is about as useful as saying the letter 't' may or may not appear somewhere in the output)?

NogDog

Presumably, each "dynamic" page is being generated from data stored in one or more database tables, triggered by some identifier in the URL that tells the PHP code which data to extract and output. In order to customize that output, you would likely need to add/modify DB tables to store that custom information, and you would likely need additional PHP code to make the determination that such data exists for a given page and then determine where/how it needs to be output. Not likely to be rocket science, but not necessarily trivial, either (depending on what your ultimate needs are, how the app is currently coded, and how clever the developer is).

It certainly, at least on the surface, does not sound anywhere near "impossible", but depending on all the details and variables that currently are not known to us, whether it is feasible within your current budget and schedule restraints is something that can't be answered yet.

80_20

Thanks for your prompt replies. As I said I'm not a programmer. This has been like throwing me in at the deep end when I can't swim.
From what I can gather the information is being collected on a database and sent to specific url addresses for each company. I will ask more specific questions relating to your post Nogdog. Thanks.
But can you tell me if the site should still have a title and page description or is that just left to the search engines to determine. I know this sounds extremely basic to you guys but from the outside this is most baffling.

cretaceous

yes it should have a title and meta tag description (and meta keywords too while you're about it)

the title you are referring to is of course the text that appears across top of the web browser bar (and can be different from the url or any text shown on the page)

title is very important for SEO
meta tags less so.. but almighty Goog uses the description to show as the summary text of a page, in its listings - if it can't find one it tends to show the first chunk of text it considers relevant, which might not be a good summary

as Nogdog said it really shouldn't be a big deal to add the facility - a half day's work, maybe a bit more (though you'd need to enter the text, which for 3000 companies is going to take a while)

oh and Google changes the rules it plays by fairly often...

80_20

Thanks cretaceous I thought that might have been the case. Yes and I have noticed the chage from national to local search criteria has made a big difference to what is shown on SEM. Thanks again everybody for your help.