Search Engine Friendly URL's

[Pats_fans]

So I guess one thing I'll start off with is that I've found that search engine friendly URL's make a big difference in your ranking, traffic, revenue, etc.

If you're using .php I'd recommend a modrewrite so that all of your URL's end in .html

Example:

http://www.yourdomain.com/category/d...hp?itemid=1234

should be:

http://www.yourdomain.com/1234/Name-Of-Item.html

I've had very good success with this method on most of my sites - and I'd recommend everyone else to do the same. The other sites I had that had the first link structure really dropped off and didn't draw much traffic, whereas the newer link structure has ranked better and had consistant traffic. Please keep in mind that your pages should be set up so that your titles, descriptions, keywords, etc. all be different and related to what each page/product, are about.

A very good book for those of you interested (at least the one that I bought that I found helpful) is this one:

Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP

Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP

(The above is not an affiliate link - hopefully you find it useful)

Hope some of you find this info useful. And I encourage others to post their tips and experiences here as well.

Ian

[MikeMann]

Search Engine Optimization, as far as URL structure, is built into WordPress, which is what I'm using for many of my sites these days. I actually use SEO even on my Christian site, which uses WordPress for the most part. The Scripture portion under Resources is non-wordpress, but optimized to hide the real address, which is as you posted, but appears similiar to the second.

Not sure if everything needs to end in .html, but making the URL more human readable is important.

[NexDog]

Look at our pretty forum URLs.

[Pats_fans]

Originally Posted by MikeMann

Search Engine Optimization, as far as URL structure, is built into WordPress, which is what I'm using for many of my sites these days. I actually use SEO even on my Christian site, which uses WordPress for the most part. The Scripture portion under Resources is non-wordpress, but optimized to hide the real address, which is as you posted, but appears similiar to the second.

Not sure if everything needs to end in .html, but making the URL more human readable is important.

I just use it because it seems to work fairly well and referral traffic from the search engines for keywords in the URL's. I read somewhere that .html did well, so that's my reasoning. I have a blog with WordPress that also does well, but when I hard coded the rewrites for my main site I set it up that way. I also did dashes instead of underscores (where spaces should have been), it seemed to also work better also.

[MikeMann]

Originally Posted by Pats_fans

I also did dashes instead of underscores (where spaces should have been), it seemed to also work better also.

I use dashes as well instead of underscores.

[JonJoyce]

If your a coldfusion user, the blogcfc application by raymond camden does some nice search engine safe URLs. for example:

http://www.jonathonjoyce.co.uk/blog/...eta-Tag-System