Search engine friendly URLs...

Have I mentioned yet that ranking well in search engines is probably the most valuable factor in determining online success? Firstly, lets get some definitions out of the way.

• Being 'search engine friendly' is all about ensuring your site is built in
  such a way as to make it attractive to search engines like Google.
• A URL is an address for a website and includes the domain name and
  everything that follows. An example of a search engine friendly URL is: http://www.thewebshowroom.com.au/blog.

As you move through a website (as a user) you are sending information back to the server about what it is that you want to see with each click you perform. This is often done by calling up a new URL. Traditionally, on websites that are database driven, the URL contains a series of characters and numbers that make no sense to the user but a lot of sense to the computer powering the website. An example of this sort of URL might be: http://www.domainaname.com/index.php?pageID=1234&SIF=abcd. This is considered a search engine unfriendly URL.

Pages with complex URLs (such as the one above) may not be indexed in search engines as effectively as pages with simple URLs like http://www.domainaname.com/welcome-to-my-site.

An equally concerning issue is the lost opportunity for your search engine ranking if your site uses the non search engine friendly URLs. When Google visits a page they weigh up a lot of factors when first determining what the page is really about and secondly how heavily they will weight it in their search results. One of the factors they assess is based on the actual words used in the URL. This includes the domain name as well as everything that follows. Search engine friendly URLs give you a great opportunity to get your keywords right in front of Google and hopefully positively impact on your ranking.

Any quality content management system (like The Web Showroom) will allow you to create search engine friendly URLs. Click around our site some more and you will see that all our URLs contain keywords rather than random letters and numbers. All our client sites enjoy this same functionality. Make sure any website development company you are considering using can do the same.