Ever wonder how a company can manage a website that has thousands of highly customized landing pages? Do they employ an army of web developers that launch into action when something like a phone number, coupon, or service feature is changed? I mean, if the site has THOUSANDS of pages, then, it’s likely many, if not all pages, need to be updated with the new information, right? That could easily equate to hundreds of hours of updates.
Rather than edit every element on every page, there is a better, more efficient way to set up a large website.
Dynamically Generate Unique Page Content
Contento Interactive works with national, multi-million dollar pay-per-click ad campaigns that require websites with thousands of pages. To efficiently apply updates to these sites, we developed a unique system to streamline and foolproof updates. We do this by building custom WordPress themes that dynamically populate repeated content that can be updated in one central location and applied to an unlimited number of pages, instantly.
What about Search Engine Optimization you ask?
Although large companies will employ massive Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns that use websites that are not indexed by search engines, many mid-size or small businesses need their website to be both the company website AND their PPC landing pages.
For these dual-purpose websites, you DO want to have unique content on each page, but you still don’t want to hand-edit all the repeating content, so we create a customized theme for your business that incorporates your unique branding and layout with our dynamically populating content.
How to Create Thousands of Highly Customized Landing Pages Quickly
Step 1: Define Repeatable Content & Unique Content
The first thing we do is determine what content is repeatable and should have a single point of entry/update and what will need unique content. Examples of repeatable content include:
- phone numbers
- contact information
- services & service descriptions
- coupons, discounts & special offers
- benefits & features
- mission statement
- bylines
- keywords
Step 2: Dynamically Construct Page Elements
We create a centrally located ‘Options’ page in the WordPress backend where the repeated content can be entered & updated easily. We call these ‘Global Content’. When we built page templates, we dynamically create these elements, so that hundreds of different pages display content from the global content blocks.
When we build a site for a client (you can read about why we NEVER use pre-packaged themes for our clients here), we code logic into the page templates that generate dynamic elements. For example on a service page – rather than editing the alt tag on every header image, we code the element to dynamically write the alt title using the location, service, company name, or other relevant information for that specific page. It’s common to inject location or service keywords into other elements as well, like titles, headings, and meta tags. Utilizing custom shortcodes, the body content can be further injected with relevant keywords.
Won’t Google punish a site for repeated content blocks?
You might be saying, this is great and all, but won’t search engines like Google punish a large site for having identical page format and identical content blocks?
This is a great question and one that we easily solved with fallback logic and shortcodes. Let’s look at a byline as an example. A byline is a couple of sentences that explain what the company is or its mission. We create a global byline element and also allow that byline to be overwritten on the individual pages. In this way, a client can add custom bylines to various pages without having to write custom bylines for EVERY page.
We further enable custom page layouts with shortcodes. A shortcode is a bit of text that WordPress recognizes as a trigger and replaces the shortcode text with alternate code – that could be any number of things like forms, images, copy, keywords, etc… With shortcodes, page content and layout are injected with global elements and can create unlimited unique layouts.
Step 3: Dynamically Construct Page Layouts
To further differentiate page layouts and content among large batches of pages, we create a variety of custom page templates. On one template the byline (as we mentioned previously) will appear at the top of the page, on another, it might appear after the page content. On any of those pages, the global byline will be injected unless the page itself has a custom byline added.
Repeating this method with other elements and layouts, with global and local content, endless variability is achieved without hand-editing every page when a content update is needed!
WordPress Consultation & Custom Theme Development
Ready to take your website to the next level with global content and dynamic templates? Contact us today to schedule a free site audit!