SEO is all about being found on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The processes number in the hundreds. However, square one is a good place to start and in SEO that is your URL and the associated structures. Here are guidelines that will be helpful:
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Keep It Clean
The shorter and cleaner your URL is, the better as far as search engines are concerned. Longer query strings (associated with dynamic URLs) are confusing to search engine spiders. Keeping it shorter and cleaner (i.e. http://www.widget.com/4/basic.html vs. http://www.widget.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic ) makes it a heck of a lot easier for a search engine to actually figure out what your page is about, and helps them distinguish folder names and find tie-ins to keywords. Not only that, static URLs are easier for users and webmasters both. A dynamic URL that’s full of parameters can be easy for a user to forget, and easy for a webmaster in a hurry to screw up. Not only that, but a dynamic URL that’s full of parameters makes it much easier for a potential hacker to see how a site is structured, then go in and create mischief. There are new methods for rewriting URLs that allow dynamics URLs to be “cloaked” in easier terms, and a static URL won’t be affected by changes in programming language (i.e. Perl vs. Java) from one page to another. -
Mind File Extensions
URLs that end in .html are favored by search engines. There are exceptions to this so make sure that you know your system well and that it’s friendly with search engine requirements. -
Spammy URLs
If you still have certain doubts about your URL, go to a resource like seomoz.com There are spam detection tools that will help weed out things like spam words, and give you tips on hyphens, sub domain depth, domain length and digits. Again, all of this information is freely available online. -
Hyphen vs. Underscores
The websites that contain an underscore in their URL are starting to become scarcer. The general belief now is that a user who is doing a Google search for “blue widget” will get better results from http://www.blue.com/blue-widget than http://www.blue.com/blue_widget. Times change, and these protocols change as well. -
Re-writing Your URLs
Lots of URLs that used to contain characters like &, +, =, _, $ and % are being overhauled to include more user- and search engine-friendly forward-slashes. This can get tricky, but there are plenty of tools out there to help facilitate this. Some are free open-source tools, and some are fee-based. The technical term is a “URL Mod-Rewrite” and this can easily be done via the .htaccess file on most servers.
To review:
- Keep them short, keep them clean.
- Keep the underscores out and replace them with dashes.
- Use lower-case to avoid case-sensitive dilemmas.
- Keep as many parameters as possible out of dynamic URL’s. Not only is it better from a search engine standpoint, but it makes it more difficult for the site to be hacked.
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March 19, 2010
