Tools for SEO: Search Engine Friendly URLs - Tools on the Web
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If you are not willing or don't know how to write a script to reprogram your dynamic URLs into static ones, then you are in luck, because there are many tools available on the web that will help you produce the code you need to enable you to create SEF URLs. You might want to consider a Windows code generator if you are on an MS IIS server.
Incorporating Keywords
You may be thinking to yourself, “Well, okay, the rewritten URL looks a bit better, but it doesn’t contain any keywords, and certainly doesn’t mean anything to me or my visitors. Now what?” Search engines are 66% to 85% more likely to list your web page in its top ten results if you utilize a keyword or phrase in the URL. So not only should you master the techniques of creating SEF URLs, you should also try to get a few highly targeted keywords placed in that SEF URL. Now, we’re just making this whole thing too complicated, right? Not necessarily. Keep in mind that it is up to you to decide how your URL will ultimately look.
So while we are creating our SEF URL, we simply plant a few of the keywords into the code for redirection or rewrite. Let me show you a little bit of what I mean. Let’s say we want our URL to look like this:
http://www.somesite.com/index.php/seo_tools_page.html |
We’ll have to take our earlier code and expand it a bit more, make it URL specific and cover multiple parameters. We may just need to add a few tweaks to incorporate the keywords where we want them. You will probably do better to find information on the specific code to do this by doing a search for mod_rewrite, as it is outside the scope of this article. Essentially there are three key steps to any mod_rewrite directive:
RewriteRule thisfile changedfilename |
There are clearly more things that will go into all of this that I haven’t covered, nor do I have the time and in the case of mod_rewrite, the knowledge to do everything you need to create the perfect SEF URLs. This article is not necessarily intended to give you all the specific instructions to utilize mod_rewrite completely effectively on all of your pages, for example, but it’s a fair start.
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