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Creating SEO friendly URLs

Submitted by: web_guy
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If you own a website, you would know that without SEO or search engine optimization, a website has no value and also stands less chance of getting indexed by the eerie search engine spiders, and will ultimately suffer in ranking. What is the end result? Poor conversions. Your website sure doesn’t deserve this treatment. One way of ensuring this is by using SE-friendly URLs. The search engines can be quite picky where URLs are concerned and get dizzy when they encounter long confusing URLs. They prefer to see URLs that do not have lengthy query strings. Our intention is to make the search engines happy.

Static URLs

SE-friendly URLs are those URLs that are easy to remember for a visitor and easily spidered. Dirty URLs (dynamic) are a thing of the past and slowly people are realizing the importance of clean URLs (static). For example, a URL like:

http://www.lookatthis.com/2/best-products

gets indexed much faster than

http://www.lookatthis.com/2/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=2&view=best

A dynamic url may confuse the search engines, and as a result your ranking will hit a low.

URL Length

At the basic level, URLs that are SE friendly are those that have keywords added to them. Make them as short as possible, with as many phrases as possible, that are relevant. Make sure to use the keywords that you wish to target the most. A web user should find it relevant and easy to type and should not be too long. Just like a short physical address is easy to remember, similarly it should have greater visibility and be easy for the visitor to remember.

Hyphens in URLs

There is another aspect of good SE-friendly URLs. Avoid using underscores to connect words and use a hyphen instead. It is a pain typing all those underscores in a URL and not only that; a URL without underscores gets viewed better by the search engines. For example, a URL like "SE_friendly" will show up only when a user types it that way and it is obviously not how we type the keywords when performing a search. Whereas, a URL such as 'SE friendly' or 'SE-friendly' happens to show up far better on the search engines and affords higher visibility.

Use Lowercase Letters

Using lowercase URLs also helps. Never have URLs all UPPERCASE or a hint of uppercase in them. We all know that people don't use uppercase when searching for something. Although, most servers are not case sensitive, you would have a problem if they were.

URL Rewrite

If you already have a website, then you will have to rewrite the URLs to cover all these discrepancies. How do we do this? Rewriting a URL means creating a system on the hosting server that will understand and interpret the new URL format. What happens is that we are actually making dynamic URLs with the static ones. It means that URLs, which had query strings earlier will be replaced with slashes and have a simple look. There are several free tools available that can be used for rewriting URLs.

Conclusion

Having static SE-friendly URLs can bring your website on the right track and help in search engine optimization. SE-friendly URLs make you website more visible to visitors and allows search engines to find it easily too. Spend time and effort in creating SE-friendly URLs and you will find that the results are overwhelming. You will find your pages moving up and your website regaining high ranking before long. See you at the top!