General SEO page question - dynamic vs static?

Question

What's better from a SEO perspective?

I normally generate a lot of my page dynamically using only one template and segments. But for SEO purposes is it better (?) to create a static template for each distinct page type?

Answer 1

Those things do not matter. Some important SEO stuff:

Are your page urls consistent and do they always load the same content? Will /segment1/segment2/segment3 always show the same main content (things like sidebar ads always change and isn't penalized)

Do the segment paths make sense? This is good:

/blog/jchrono-battle/why-i-use-expression-engine

This is bad:

/templates/blogtemplate_1/jchrono-battle/12345

Does your HTML structure follow best practices for HTML5, using modern tags to create better crawlable structures

<header>
    <nav> 
        <ul><li>Nav here!</li></ul>
    </nav>
</header>
<article>
    <h1>Article Title</h1>    
    <section>Article section</section>
    <section>Article section</section>
    <aside>Side note!</aside>
</article>

<footer>
    Footer here!
</footer>

instead of being blogged down by

<div> <div> <div> .... </div> </div> </div>

The bottom line is that how you generate your HTML output doesn't matter, it's all the best practices for SEO you put on top of those URL schemes and generated pages.

Edit This post isn't meant to be all encompassing, but AllInOne mentioned one of the more important aspects of SEO optimization (thanks!). Page time to load and render is weighted pretty importantly, so make sure you are keeping your styles minified and combined, and your JS minified, combined, and (where appropriate) mangled. Also don't forget to use appropriate image sizes and formats. Don't load a 2000x2000px PNG file with a 500x500px jpeg works in place (extreme example).

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=SEO+Best+Practices

There's a million resources for what is best here and it can be conflicting, so I'd suggest looking towards articles by the crawlers (google, bing, yahoo) on what matters the most.

Some good starters:

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/seo-analyzer

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897