Friendly URLs: A Friend to SEO too

When a search engine starts to index your site one of the first things that it comes across is the address of the first web page. From there it will hopefully find links to other pages and so on until it has crawled your site.

There are a number of factors that determine for what search engine keywords that page will rank but a very important one is the detail of the website address - the web page Unique Resource Locator (URL) to give it it's proper name.

If you have a static or smaller website that isn't driven by a database then you can very easily start to create appropriate folders and pages within your site that have meaningful names. Giving the page the name of the important keywords within it is an easy win for your search engine optimisation, and people's ability to remember it.

http://www.example.com/dresses/black/prom.html

For a static site the address above works perfectly well but often you will find that larger, database driven websites can't have individual pages crafted or each item they sell. Instead, a website coding template is used that displays the necessary information from the database.

In cases like these the website itself does the thinking. It looks at the web URL and breaks down the component parts until it finds the appropriate item in the database. For example

http://www.example.com/dresses/black/prom/little_black_number.

Notice the slightly different notation (no need for the .html extension) and the use of underscores instead of spaces. There are two things to note here:

Firstly, the category of prom in the black and dresses category has to be set up to be unique. You can't have two categories with the same name otherwise the system will get confused. That shouldn’t be too much of a concern if you've planned your website properly.

The second point is more of an observation in that our imaginary dress "little black number" has been given underscores between the words. Why is this? Well, it is first and foremost because spaces are not allowed in website addresses. If you try to do this you end up with the rather messy %20 being displayed which is a result of UTF8 encoding.

Anyhow, technicalities aside, the underscore provides a way for you to emulate spaces. Simply enough. Ah - but wait - there is another way to emulate a space which is the use of the hyphen/dash (e.g. "little-black-dress"). Shouldn't we use those instead?

Well, in this case the answer is no because "little black dress" is actually one key phrase that we want to attract. Using the alternative hyphen/dash would have separated the three separate words out and our page would have been trying to rank under the words little, black and dress separately.

If you are running a website - particularly an e-commerce store - that doesn't yet use friendly URLs like the ones above then let us know and we'll have a talk with you about how we can go about upgrading your site.

Thanks_for_reading!