I'm curious how the SEO URL option in a lot of content management systems and other scripts (wordpress, mybb, etc.) helps. What's the difference in the eyes of the search engines?
the more the post is close to the to domain (example.com/this-is-the-post-name.html) the better i think this way it is easies to crawl. easier for robots to find. it is better that example.com/articles/2009/03/04/post-names.html look how many folders the bot have to go through.
Actually, what they usually are asking is if you want to use mod rewrite (or other functions) to change the URL from something like this.. www.example.com?node_id=42 To something like this... www.example.com/node/42 In this example, there's really not much difference anymore. Back in the old days, when we first started working with dynamic query strings (in perl CGI!), google and other search engines had trouble with the special characters '?', '&' and '='. But that's long been resolved now. That being said, neither www.example.com?node_id=42 nor www.example.com/node/42 are very optimized. What you'd really like to see is the useless word 'node' removed altogether, and insert a hyphen delimited key phrase in there instead. Some content management systems will allow you do create an alternative URL when you create the page, but that's usually not part of the SEF or SEO URLS option.
Most CMS software have SEO friendly URL's feature built-in. Avoid any special characters in your urls. Keep your urls as short as possible. Stuffing keywords in urls is not a good strategy. Avoid using too many sub folders like doman/sub-folder1/sub-folder2/sub-folder3/something.html. The key is to make your urls look like a static website's urls that end with .html, htm, or no extension. Search engine spiders are getting smarter at crawling. So, in case you have to insert special characters like "=" or "?", it is going to work okay.
many CMS had keywords sys, I use one CMS called DEDE, it can automatic replace the keywords to URLs..
this is really god advise! i will keep this in mind when i start up my site. Is there any difference between dashes and underscore in urls? which will crawlers find first?
Quite simply, the view on this is: Humanized URL = Human created content. Not only does it give you the chance to add an extra key term into the mix, but it makes it easier for the user to remember the URL so they can come back to it. Just don't spam the URL.
If you're using Wordpress, I highly recommend the "All in One SEO Pack" plugin. It will make your URL's SEO-Friendly so that you don't have to stress out about it. Then you don't have to be thinking about spaces, underscores, etc. - the plugin will do it for you.