SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website – part 2 of 8

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URLs (Uniform Resource Locator)

Yesterday I wrote the intro to this 8 part mini series on SEO. So without further a do, let’s get stuck straight in.

Firstly, this isn’t a discussion on what static or dynamic URLs are. (If you want to know to the difference then take a look at this aritcle although reading it is not a prerequisite for this post )

What this post is about is how we name our web page URLs can improve our search engine ranking positions.

For example, I’m sure you’ve seen web pages with something like this http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic in the address bar… When you look at it you can probably only remember the

a) example.com bit
b) or maybe at a push the /cgi-binbit that comes after

…but then it becomes a bit fuzzy…

Wouldn’t it be easier to remember if it was something like this http://www.example.com/product-info or http://www.example.com/exactly-what-you-eneterd-into-google …?

Well you can do it… and not only is it memorable for the person using it but search engines like Google reference your efforts in the search results.

For example, let’s say I was searching Google for information on dynamic and static URLs, I might enter into Google ‘dynamic static URL‘. This produces quite a few results but the first one displays the following:

Notice the web address in green and the words which are in Green B old www.webconfs.com/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-article-3.php – Talk about relevancy

This is called SEF or search engine friendly URLs – but how is it done?

Well if your website is an open source CMS (content managed site/system) then you can pretty much bet that someone has written an SEF plugin for it that will take care of business for you. Here are a few links to get you started:

There are others and you need to follow installation or how to instructions when implementing them – but the instructions on what to do are easy enough to follow. However, if in doubt… DON’T DO ANYTHING and ASK

If you have a static website that you’ve created using something like Adobe Dreamweaver – then you don’t need to worry about components or plugins – just save the page you’re working on based on the content of that particular page e.g. http://www.example.com/how-to-milk-a-chicken.html – if milking chickens is your thing… ! Just remember not to use spaces or punctuation between the words use a ‘ - ‘ (dash) to separate them.

Note: This is also better than using an ‘ _ ‘ (underscore) because these can’t be seen when the URL becomes clickable and could be incorrectly written down if your site has links that put an underline beneaththem when the mouse hovers over it e.g. this_is_just_a_test_link

But for whichever type of site you have, if you’re really up on your game, make the URL include what people are actually searching for… which I’ll go over that in Part 4…

See you tomorrow for Part 3 of ‘SEO: No animals were harmed in creating this website‘ – Page Titles

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