I’ve been talking about programmatic SEO a little bit lately, and one of the core features of programmatic SEO is being able to dynamically insert variables.
What does this mean though? How does it work? How can you leverage dynamic variable insertion?
What’s a variable?
A variable, in this case anyway, is a piece of information pulled from a database.
Something like <ram> for a laptop. Each laptop model can have a different value for <ram>, and so it is a variable.
This <ram> could have values like 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB.
What is Dynamic Variable Insertion (DVI)?
Dynamic Variable Insertion is when you take these variables, and insert them into a piece of content dynamically, or on the fly.
It’s a key part of dynamic content generation.
Whilst ‘technically’ this is what happens when you have a table of data, or specs, DVI is really only when you use these specs within a piece of content itself.
So using the <ram> example from earlier, you could have a sentence on a product page that says something like;
This laptop has <ram> of ram installed.
After the variable is inserted, you’d have sentences of;
This laptop has 8GB of ram installed.
This laptop has 16GB of ram installed.
This laptop has 32GB of ram installed.
These variables can also be used on category/search pages, by using averages/maxs/mins/sums etc.
The average ram installed on laptops by <brand> is <ram>.
So it’s just taking a piece of data, and inserting it somewhere.
That’s all there is to it. Something extremely powerful, yet simple to leverage.
What can you do with it though? Well, that’s where you’ll need to read the other posts around dynamic content generation.
