How to Make your URLs SEO Friendly

Originally published at Avangate.com, April 27, 2007

Without search engine optimization many websites stand the chance of not being fully indexed by search spiders therefore risking not being ranked high enough (if at all) in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The resulting poor conversion rate makes the website a dead weight, demoralizes your staff and could threaten your business.
URL Rewriting
This situation is quite easy to avoid by performing some cosmetic operations to the site. One of these operations, URL rewriting, is considered by some rather difficult and a bit time-consuming but can be extremely effective and rewarding in the long run.

Why It Is Nice to Have Clean URL’s
There are two very strong reasons for you to rewrite your URLs, the first of which is related to Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are much more at ease with URLs that don’t contain long query strings.

A URL like http://www.example.com/4/basic.html can be indexed very easily whereas its dynamic form, http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic, can potentially confuse search engines and cause them to miss important information contained in the URL and you to miss those anticipated high rankings.

With clean URLs, the search engines can distinguish folder names and can establish real links to keywords. Query string parameters continue to be an impediment in many search engine’s attempts to fully index sites. Several SEO professionals agree that dynamic (or, dirty) URLs are not very appealing to web spiders, while static URLs have greater visibility in their electronic eyes.

The second strong reason for URL rewriting would be the increased usability for web users and “maintainability” for webmasters. Clean URLs are much easier to remember. A regular web surfer will not remember a URL full of parameters, and would obviously be discouraged by the idea of typing the entire URL. This is less prone to happen with clean URLs. Easily remembered URLs help you create a more intuitive Web site and make it easier for your visitors to anticipate where they can find information they need.
Webmasters tend to find that maintaining static URLs is a much easier task than working 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 very possible for webmasters to make mistakes during maintenance sessions, resulting in broken links. Also, when static URLs are used, the links to the site’s pages will still remain valid should it be necessary to migrate a site from one programming language to another (e.g. from Perl to Java).

Dashes vs. Underscores
Websites that still use underscores for their URLs are becoming scarcer and scarcer. Some say that people who still use underscores are “old school” while dashes seem be used far more often these days.

A usability related reason for using dashes rather than underscores is the elimination of the confusion created between a space and an underscore when the URL is viewed as a link, or when printing such a URL.

More to the point, the chances that a combination of keywords contained in your Web site is included in the SERPs increase exponentially when using dashes.

For exemple: a URL that contains “seo_techniques” will be shown by the search engine only if the user searches for seo_techniques (this kind of search is rarely performed); whereas searches for “seo”, “techniques”, or “seo techniques” gives your URL containing “seo-techniques” a better chance of being displayed on the SERPs. The dash will help you more than you can imagine, by greatly improving your visibility on the Web.

How to Rewrite URLs
The principle of URL rewriting is actually setting a “system” on the host server that will allow it (the server) to know how to interpret the new URL format. What actually happens when one decides to rewrite the URLs of a website is called masking the dynamic URLs with static ones. This means that the URLs that previously contained query strings with elements such as “?”, “+”, “&”, “$”, “=”, or “%” will contain the more search engine friendly “/” (slash) element, presenting themselves in a simplified form.
To help you with cleaning your URLs here are some rewriting tools and engines, some free of charge, others fee based.

Online / Open Source Tools

* http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/url-rewriting/
* open Source URL Rewriter for .NET / IIS / ASP.NET:http://urlrewriter.net/
* open Source rewrite-module tuned for ASP.NET 2.0:http://www.urlrewriting.net/en/FAQ.aspx
* mod_rewrite:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

This is the most common non-fee-based rewriting engine. It is a module from the Apache HTTP Server that allows the easy manipulation of URLs. The use of this module requires the enabling of the RewriteEngine on your Apache server. Then, rewrite rules must be defined, (you can even set conditions for each rule), thus allowing the rewrite requests as they come in.

In terms of SEO, mod_rewrite can be helpful if you have complex URLs that contain more than 2 parameters. In other words, if one of your dynamic URLs is accessed, the mechanism behind mod_rewrite will “translate” it into a shorter, friendlier, static-looking URL.

Fee-Based Tools

* ISAPI_Rewrite
The Internet Server Application Program Interface (ISAPI) is another URL manipulation engine that functions in a similar way to Apache’s mod_rewrite, the difference being it is designed specifically for Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Server).
* IISRewrite
IISRewrite is a stripped down implementation of Apache’s mod_rewrite modules for IIS. It is a rule-based rewriting engine that allows a Webmaster to manipulate URLs on the fly in IIS.

URL Examples
Here are some examples of how URLs can look before and after rewriting:

Example 1:

* Dynamic URL: http://www.companyname.com/products/...el=y&variety=z (before rewriting)
* Static URL: http://www.companyname.com/x/y/z.html (after rewriting)

Example 2:

* Dynamic URL: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic (before writing)
* Static URL: http://www.example.com/4/basic.html (after writing)

Conclusions
URL rewriting can put you on the right track in the race for high organic rankings when combined with other SEO techniques. Be aware that rewritten (and, presumably, better looking and more effective in terms of search engine ranking) URLs cannot substitute or make up for a poorly designed Web site.

Don’t expect miracles. Nevertheless, when you decide that your site needs a makeover and start rewriting your URLs, make sure that:

* You keep them as short as possible (to increase usability),
* You use dashes rather than underscores (to give your site a better chance of ranking as high as possible in the SERPs),
* You use lowercase letters rather than uppercase ones (to avoid those case sensitive situations),
* The technology you have used cannot be detected in any of your URLs (to prevent possible hacker attacks).

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Adriana Iordan is the Web Marketing Manager at Avangate.com She spends a great deal of her time writing articles, improving and promoting websites. Adriana manages the team offering internet marketing and usability services to Avangate clients and the online promotion of Avangate.com’s websites.

 

Great sharing
And great help for noobs

 

thanks i did not read the whole thing its to long. but what i did read it was very good thanks

 

Thanks for the long and detail sharing....Any other more tips and tricks to share?

 

Good tips, and I am a firm believer in SEO friendly URLs. For those of you using Wordpress it is a 2 second job with the Permalinks menu.

 

I'm a bit sceptical about the SEO friendly URLs. Even after reading about the subject alot I have a hard time believing that it makes any difference to google (and that's pretty much the only SE I'm concerned about) whether my URLs are dynamic or static-looking.

I mean, what does google care if I submit a sitemap with URLs like

www.mysite.com/index.php?foo=bar&this=that​

instead of

www.mysite.com/foo/bar/this/that​

They are gonna crawl the site through based on my sitemap anyway and index any pages they deem worthy.

Everywhere I've seen it touted that SEO friendly URLs make your site more appealing to search engines and spiders, but nowhere have I seen any logical grounds for such claims. I can see how such crawling issues could have been the case sometime in the past, but even today..?

Some claim that SEs clip away the dynamic parts, but this is clearly not the case (at least with google) since my site has some 20k+ dynamic URLs indexed at the moment.

If the issue was only about getting keywords into your URLs or being user friendly, that I could readily buy.

I see this come up so often that I'm ready to climb into the bandwagon 'just in case'. But I'd love to see some logical basis for these claims.

 

So simple, Don't use dynamic URL, convert to simple one, and use there your targeted keywords with using hyphen symbol.
It makes sense...

 

Great! Thanks for the article

 

Well, if a clean URL has more than 20 characters, it will be hard to remember for me, no matter how clean it is.
http://mysite.com/This-is-an-easy-to-remember-link-which-I-would-rather-save-in-my-bookmark-folder
If by "remember" you mean that "I've seen this link before" instead of "I remember the link and I'll type it", then I agree.

In a link like
http://mysite.com/Folder1/Folder2/Folder3/Content.html,
Folder1, 2, 3 might be only characters in the link, not actual folders on the server.
When I first read about this techique, I thought that there is 1:1 corespondence between the folders on the servers and the ones from the link.

I've read a lot of articles about URL rewriting, but I've seldom saw these 2 aspects discussed:
- why is better http://mysite.com/xxx/yyy/zzz instead of http://mysite.com/xxx/yyy/zzz.html
- how to actually do the rewriting. In almost all articles there is a lot of theory and very little simple info. Yes, there is lot of information available in external links, but it's way too much for a simple understanding of the concept.

For instance:
you need a text file called .htaccess, with the following lines:
RewriteEngine On (to start the rewriting engine)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?page=%1
The file index.php will read the pagename, search it into a database, and do the action that is associated with a certain id from the table. A table will have one column with the id and the other with the SEO friendly name of it.

See, there is less than a paragraph, but it saved me hours of frustration reading tons of pages with no useful examples.

 

I always thought the second one would be the better one. I assumed it would be showing the SE's a page (.html) instead of a directory (/). But I could be way off base, maybe neither matter or maybe your right.

Can someone with actual data show if it makes a different?

 

Thanks Lamine for sharing this valuable tips.

 

Yes Chaitanya is right,

Well follow the procedure, to get better ranking,
For ex. If you are having web design page in website than select,

"yoursite.net/web-design-company.html"

and avoid to use

"yoursite.net/webdesigncompany.html

webdesigncompany will not be a generic keyword for the SE's.

Regards,

James.

 

I read here some points of view about this matter.

 

501 read the page you sent and it looks like how to setup up the .htaccess, unless I missed something. I assumed we were all talking about URL rewrite.

My question is when your rewriting the URL is "/" a better ending then ".html" for SEO or is ".html better than "/" or does it not even matter?

 

I think SE friendly URL's are outdated, this was key back in the day maybe but i think dynamic URL does not have a major disadvantage in Google's eyes.
I don't think Google should give advantage to SE friendly URL because for one is looks spammy and can also be too long-winded.
I think all SE are much more sophisticated nowadays imo so doesn't make a difference.
But even if i wanted to i can't because i can't use mod_rewrite on my host

 

i think that .html is better

 

The stuff was really interesting. As far as dashes or underscore is concerned, I feel that google doesnt take them into consideration. This is just my personal observation watching wikipedia closely.

Along with these benefits, you are also making your website technology independant. So tommorow, if your web pages changes from php to asp or vice versa, it will have no ill effect on your rankings

Whether you have asp, php or any other your links will always be technology indepedant along with SEO friendly.

 

nice article

 

What a great article. I wish the OP would post some of this on my forum . Anyway, I don't understand people who can't see how static, clean urls are more beneficial than dynamic for SEO and for users. It's just common sense.

 

That was a great article.