Tools for SEO: Search Engine Friendly URLs
(Page 1 of 4 )
Search engines prefer static URLs to dynamic URLs. This article explains the difference, tells why search engines don't like dynamic URLs, and shows you some ways to make your dynamic URLs look like static ones.
There are many reasons a webmaster may want to change the look and feel of a web page address. They may have dynamic URLs that need to be search engine-friendly, the page may have moved, the whole site may have moved to a new domain name, or they need to be better for users to view as interesting in the SERPs for more traffic and searchability. Whatever a webmaster’s reasons for changing the way a URL is handled, there are definitely good ways to do this in regard to SEO, and then there are some bad ones, too.
In this article I want to look at a few ways you can utilize a few simple server tools and redirection elements to provide your site with static-looking search engine friendly URLs.
Dynamic URLs
There are two types of URLs: dynamic and static. A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a script. In contrast to static URLs, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML, dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site's database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database.
Because of the way that dynamic URLs are created, they sometimes create nightmares in the area of search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines do not like to index dynamic URLs. There are multiple reasons for this, one of them being the non-standard characters like ?, &, %, =, and others in the URL. Many times, anything after the character is disregarded. For example, we may have URLs that look something like this:
http://www.somesite.com/index.php?
forumid&=120957w&=0404200620%search
http://www.somesite.com/index.php?
forumid&=143212x&=0617200720%search
http://www.somesite.com/index.php?
forumid&=236718b&=1127200420%search
Well, you get the idea. So if the part of the URL after the first character is disregarded, the URLs look like this to a search engine:
http://www.somesite.com/index.php
http://www.somesite.com/index.php
http://www.somesite.com/index.php |
Any URL that is viewed this way to a search engine is going to essentially be nothing more than a bunch of duplicate URLs. And we all know how much search engines just love duplicate URLs. (Okay, I was being sarcastic, as they don’t). They would much rather index a URL that looks like this:
http://www.somesite.com/index.php/seo_tools_page.html |
|
In other areas, many times dynamic content is hard to spider, especially if it is pulled from the database with client-side code like JavaScript. If you can’t view the page source and view the content of a web page, there is a very good chance that a search engine spider will not be able to either. While search engines are getting much better at indexing dynamic URLs, they would still prefer static URLs.
So the challenge of dynamic URLs is clear: how do you keep the dynamic site without compromising the indexing of your pages with regard to SEO? By creating search engine-friendly (SEF) URLs, that’s how! Let’s look at a few methods we want to be familiar with in our quest for SEF URLs. Quite frankly, it may sound like a daunting mission, but it’s certainly not a mission impossible.
Next: Static Pages >>
More Search Optimization Articles
More By Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy
