How to Make your Urls SEO Friendly

by Vijay

It is a well-known fact nowadays that without SEO a Web site stands many chances of not being indexed by search spiders,

therefore risking not being ranked high enough (or even at all) in the SERPs. The result: poor conversion rate.

Do you show search engines anything that a visitor does not see?

There is a common tactic that certain search engine optimization companies use called "cloaking." In simple terms, these

companies use technology that enables your website to recognize when a visitor to your site is a spider and to then feed that

spider specialized content designed to rank highly in search engines. This tactic violates the Terms of Service (TOS) of

every major search engine. Sites that are caught cloaking are routinely removed from engines. Therefore, depending on

your tolerance for risk, you may want to find a search engine optimization company that does not employ this tactic.
This situation is quite easy to avoid by performing some "cosmetic" operations on a site. One of these operations, considered

by some rather difficult and a bit time-consuming, but quite effective in the long run by others, is URL rewriting.

Do you create pages, either on my server or somewhere else, that are not built into the navigation of my site?

Another common technique that some search engine optimization companies employ is the creation of "doorway pages."

Since the term "doorway page" now has such a negative connotation in the industry, many search engine optimization companies

have their own names for such pages: "gateway pages," "bridge pages," "targeted entry pages," "specialized content pages,"

and so on. Whatever they are called, such pages are rarely effective and also put websites at risk of penalization, as this

is another tactic that violates the TOS of every major engine. If your potential search engine optimization company does not

give you a definitive "no" to the above question, you may want to look elsewhere.

Why It Is Nice to Have Clean URL's

There could be two very strong reasons for you to rewrite your URLs. One of them is related to Search Engine Optimization. It

seems that search engines are much more at ease with URLs that don't contain long query strings.

A URL like seo can be indexed much easier, whereas its dynamic form,

http://www.searchenginerankings.com.au, can actually confuse the search engines and cause them to miss possibly important

information contained in the URL, and thus preventing you from getting the expected ranking.

With clean URLs, the search engines can distinguish folder names and can establish real links to keywords. Query string

parameters seem to be an impediment in a search engine's attempt to perform the indexing. Many of the SEO professionals agree

that dynamic (a.k.a. dirty) URLs are not very appealing to web spiders, while static URLs have greater visibility in their

"eyes".

The other strong reason for URL rewriting would be the increase in usability for web users, and in maintainability for

webmasters. Clean URLs are much easier to remember. A regular web surfer will find hard to remember a URL full of parameters,

not to mention that they would be discouraged by the idea of typing, one character at a time, the entire URL. And they could

also mistype it, and not get to where they wanted.

This is less prone to happen with clean URLs. They can help you create a more intuitive Web site altogether, making it easier

for your visitors to anticipate where they could find the information they need.

Webmasters will find themselves that maintaining static URLs is a much

easier task than with dynamic ones. Static URLs are more abstract, and thus more difficult to hack. The dynamic URLs are more

transparent, allowing possible hackers to see the technology used to build them and thus facilitating attacks.

Also, given the length of dynamic URLs, it is possible for webmasters to make mistakes too during maintenance

sessions, usually resulting in broken links. Not to mention that, when static URLs are used, should it be necessary to

migrate a site from one programming language to another (e.g. from Perl to Java), the links to the site's pages will still

remain valid.

Read full article to learn how to rewrite a URL : http://www.searchenginerankings.com.au

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