how to make a news website news searchable

Question

I'm making a news website, in the database I have data like: title, description,..etc
What I've made is making a single page and when the user chooses a title he gets the full story (in the same page).
I've been thinking that the news can't be found in google like that cause there are no meta info.
I've looked through several news websites and from what I've seen I think that they're making a php file for each piece of news they insert and add the meta..
Is what I think true?? is it standard for news websites??

Answer 1

General way of doing

In a real and well-developed application you would store, next to the title, news itself also a seotitle (a title without special characters and spaces) keywords and other meta tags you want to make accessable by google.

+----------------------------------------------------+
| newsid | title | keywords | seotitle | newscontent |
+----------------------------------------------------+

You then develop a php file that checks if a get param, e.g. "seotitle" (news.php?seotitle=My+News) exists and look up in the database for the requested seotitle and if it's found you load all newsdata into your php file and generate valid html dom.

$query = "SELECT * FROM news WHERE seotitle = ".$_GET['seotitle'].";

The last step is to make it search engine friendly. In order to have seo friendly urls you have to work with mod_rewrite (apache webserver) e.g.

Right now I have no working mod_rewrite/seo snippet but you can google that.

Description

Even though physically we have one file google sees them, thanks to the different urls, as different pages and crawls them.

Attention

The above stated "General way of doing" is only the very basic. You should also consider language of the news or what happens if the news title change.