I'm not sure how to deploy best practice for SEO in a new project.
I'm building a CMS that will be used by a group of writers to post news articles to a website. I'm developing the site using Perl and Template-Toolkit (TT2). I've also embedded an open source editor (TinyMCE) in the system that will be used for content creation.
I was planning to save the news article content to the DB as text - though I could also save it to flat files and then save the corresponding file paths to the DB.
From an SEO standpoint, I think it would be very helpful if this content could be exposed to search engines. There will be lots of links and images that could help to improve rankings.
If I put this content in the DB, it won't be discoverable ... right?
If I save this content in template files (content.tt) will the .tt files be recognized by search engines?
Note that the template files (.tt) will be displayed as content via a TT2 wrapper.
I'm also planning to generate a Google XML Sitemap using the Sitemap 0.90 standard. Perhaps this is suffiecient? Or should I try to make the actual content discoverable?
Thanks ... just not sure how the google dance deals with .tt files and such.
If I put this content in the DB, it won't be discoverable ... right?
The database is part of your backend. Google cares about what you expose to the front end.
If I save this content in template files (content.tt) will the .tt files be recognized by search engines?
Your template files are also part of your backend.
Note that the template files (.tt) will be displayed as content via a TT2 wrapper.
The wrapper takes the template files and the data in the database and produces HTML pages. The HTML pages are what Google sees.
Link to those pages.