30th Apr 2009
How to Make your URLs SEO Friendly
Why It Is Nice to Have Clean URL’s
There could be two very strong reasons for you to rewrite your URLs. One of them is related to Search Engine Optimization. It seems that search engines are much more at ease with URLs that don’t contain long query strings.
A URL like http://www.example.com/4/basic.html can be indexed much easier, whereas its dynamic form, http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic, can actually confuse the search engines and cause them to miss possibly important information contained in the URL, and thus preventing you from getting the expected ranking.
With clean URLs, the search engines can distinguish folder names and can establish real links to keywords. Query string parameters seem to be an impediment in a search engine’s attempt to perform the indexing. Many of the SEO professionals agree that dynamic (a.k.a. dirty) URLs are not very appealing to web spiders, while static URLs have greater visibility in their “eyes”.
The other strong reason for URL rewriting would be the increase in usability for web users, and in maintainability for webmasters. Clean URLs are much easier to remember. A regular web surfer will find hard to remember a URL full of parameters, not to mention that they would be discouraged by the idea of typing, one character at a time, the entire URL. And they could also mistype it, and not get to where they wanted.
This is less prone to happen with clean URLs. They can help you create a more intuitive Web site altogether, making it easier for your visitors to anticipate where they could find the information they need.
Webmasters will find themselves that maintaining static URLs is a much easier task than with dynamic ones. Static URLs are more abstract, and thus more difficult to hack. The dynamic URLs are more transparent, allowing possible hackers to see the technology used to build them and thus facilitating attacks.
Also, given the length of dynamic URLs, it is possible for webmasters to make mistakes too during maintenance sessions, usually resulting in broken links. Not to mention that, when static URLs are used, should it be necessary to migrate a site from one programming language to another (e.g. from Perl to Java), the links to the site’s pages will still remain valid.
Dashes vs. Underscores
This is an issue where people have different opinions. The Web sites that still use underscores for their URLs are becoming scarcer and scarcer; Dashes seem to hold the upper hand these days.
Among the reasons for using dashes rather than underscores, we can distinguish some usability-related ones, such as the elimination of the confusion created between a space and an underscore when the URL is viewed as a link, or when printing such a URL.
Other than this, the chances that a combination of keywords contained in your Web site is included in the SERPs increase exponentially when using dashes.
To exemplify: a URL that contains “seo_techniques” will be shown by the search engine only if the user searches for seo_techniques (but this kind of search is rarely performed); whereas searches for “seo”, “techniques”, or “seo techniques” give your “seo-techniques” containing URL a better chance of being displayed on the SERPs. So, it is safe to say that this humble graphic sign can help you more than you can imagine, by greatly improving your visibility on the Web.
How to Rewrite an URL
The principle of URL rewriting is actually setting a “system” on the host server that will allow it (i.e. the server) to know how to interpret the new URL format. What actually happens when one decides to rewrite the URLs of a certain Web site is masking the dynamic URLs with static ones. This means that the URLs that previously contained query strings with elements such as “?”, “+”, “&”, “$”, “=”, or “%” will contain the more search engine friendly “/” (slash) element and present themselves in a simplified form.
Rewriting Tools
To help you with cleaning your URLs, there are rewriting tools and engines, some free of charge, other fee based. have a look at one such tool, that I found : Free Online URL Rewriting.
Why It Is Nice to Have Clean URL’s
There could be two very strong reasons for you to rewrite your URLs. One of them is related to Search Engine Optimization. It seems that search engines are much more at ease with URLs that don’t contain long query strings.
A URL like http://www.example.com/4/basic.html can be indexed much easier, whereas its dynamic form, http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic, can actually confuse the search engines and cause them to miss possibly important information contained in the URL, and thus preventing you from getting the expected ranking.
With clean URLs, the search engines can distinguish folder names and can establish real links to keywords. Query string parameters seem to be an impediment in a search engine’s attempt to perform the indexing. Many of the SEO professionals agree that dynamic (a.k.a. dirty) URLs are not very appealing to web spiders, while static URLs have greater visibility in their “eyes”.
The other strong reason for URL rewriting would be the increase in usability for web users, and in maintainability for webmasters. Clean URLs are much easier to remember. A regular web surfer will find hard to remember a URL full of parameters, not to mention that they would be discouraged by the idea of typing, one character at a time, the entire URL. And they could also mistype it, and not get to where they wanted.
This is less prone to happen with clean URLs. They can help you create a more intuitive Web site altogether, making it easier for your visitors to anticipate where they could find the information they need.
Webmasters will find themselves that maintaining static URLs is a much easier task than with dynamic ones. Static URLs are more abstract, and thus more difficult to hack. The dynamic URLs are more transparent, allowing possible hackers to see the technology used to build them and thus facilitating attacks.
Also, given the length of dynamic URLs, it is possible for webmasters to make mistakes too during maintenance sessions, usually resulting in broken links. Not to mention that, when static URLs are used, should it be necessary to migrate a site from one programming language to another (e.g. from Perl to Java), the links to the site’s pages will still remain valid.
Dashes vs. Underscores
This is an issue where people have different opinions. The Web sites that still use underscores for their URLs are becoming scarcer and scarcer; Dashes seem to hold the upper hand these days.
Among the reasons for using dashes rather than underscores, we can distinguish some usability-related ones, such as the elimination of the confusion created between a space and an underscore when the URL is viewed as a link, or when printing such a URL.
Other than this, the chances that a combination of keywords contained in your Web site is included in the SERPs increase exponentially when using dashes.
To exemplify: a URL that contains “seo_techniques” will be shown by the search engine only if the user searches for seo_techniques (but this kind of search is rarely performed); whereas searches for “seo”, “techniques”, or “seo techniques” give your “seo-techniques” containing URL a better chance of being displayed on the SERPs. So, it is safe to say that this humble graphic sign can help you more than you can imagine, by greatly improving your visibility on the Web.
How to Rewrite an URL
The principle of URL rewriting is actually setting a “system” on the host server that will allow it (i.e. the server) to know how to interpret the new URL format. What actually happens when one decides to rewrite the URLs of a certain Web site is masking the dynamic URLs with static ones. This means that the URLs that previously contained query strings with elements such as “?”, “+”, “&”, “$”, “=”, or “%” will contain the more search engine friendly “/” (slash) element and present themselves in a simplified form.
Rewriting Tools
To help you with cleaning your URLs, there are rewriting tools and engines, some free of charge, other fee based. have a look at one such tool, that I found : Free Online URL Rewriting.
Posted by Supriya Agnihotri Jagani under 
SEO 
1 Comment »