Utilize Directories for Increased Hits - Raw URLs
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I'll use an example from my site, UnitedBands.com to illustrate the process I'm referring to. Unitedbands.com is a dynamic site that uses PHP scripts to pull data about different bands from a database. There was one PHP page that was responsible for 80% of the web site's content. At first I wasn't concerned about what this page was called. I just wanted it to do what I needed it do to and that was to bring up information about particular bands. Originally, the name of that page was called 'viewProfile.php' and it was placed in the root directory of the site. The bands were referenced by a number, so the actual link to bring up a particular band may have looked like the following:
http://unitedbands.com/viewProfile.php?ID=345
For the human eye, this link wasn't too obfuscated. From the name of the site it could be deduced that the site relates to bands and the 'viewProfile' script would allow a visitor to view the profile of a particular band. The number was probably a unique identification number associated with an individual band (add 'individual band' to your list of oxymorons). However, to a search engine, the URL was next to meaningless. There existed two variables in particular that required search engine modification to really bring out the potential for major search engine click-throughs.
I needed to make a directory structure that would be descriptive to the search engines. For my site this was a no-brainer. The data consisted of band profiles, so I wanted the directory to be called 'bands'. Since I have a dynamic web site, I used URL re-writing to create a pseudo-directory called 'bands'. (Check out the this article on Dev Shed to see how that's done: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Apache/Search-Engine-Friendly-URLs-with-mod_rewrite.)
If your site consists of static pages, you don't need to worry about URL re-writing. URL re-writing is only for sites that are using dynamic content but want a way to be able to have descriptive URLs instead of obfuscated ones.
Next: Moving in the Right Direction >>
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