Gabriel Harper’s Blog

Every professional webmaster and site owner needs to maximize traffic to their web site. Affiliate programs, link exchanges, search submission programs, and pay-per-click services offer many ways to promote yourself, but webmasters around the world still pour countless hours into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google is the biggest target and it is no surprise, with over 55 billion searches made on their site in 2003.

When search engine placement comes up, we hear a lot about keywords. Every web site has a specific list of keywords which the webmaster can configure, and those keywords are included “behind the scenes” with every visitor your site receives. These keywords are specifically stored in “META” tags contained within the web site’s code. Search engines can pick up on these keywords and use them to categorize and rank your site, giving you better or worse ratings. Or so we read anyway, as the reality of SEO is a little different.

Why Optimize URLs?

Search engines pay attention to a lot more than keywords, and Google is no exception. Google is an intelligent outfit, and over the years they have learned to ignore the classic tricks used to pull high ratings. Your web site is evaluated for real content containing the keywords your potential visitor is searching for. A rating is placed on every link leading into and away from your site, the size and weight of text is considered, the page title, navigation structure, and the often overlooked URL. To clarify, the URL is the link that references an actual page on your site. Your front page URL is probably something simple, like:

http://www.socksfordogs.com

Hopefully you’re selling something a little more marketable than socks for dogs, but you get the picture. Your domain name (the www.socksfordogs.com part), is central to search engine placement. Every page on your web site extends from this URL. For example, you might have an important article on cleaning the Fleece Ultra line of professional dog socks. This could be a very useful article for new visitors, and a great way to introduce them to your product. The problem starts when your URL goes from:

http://www.socksfordogs.com

to…

http://www.socksfordogs.com/articles.php?id=AvC6ecV&l=en&ref=294&s=782hhs7hd

Yikes. That URL may make perfect sense to your web server, but any search engine is going to see a mess of numbers and letters, and promptly discard them. Google has a tendency to strip off these extra characters and focus on the most understandable part to derive its results:

http://www.socksfordogs.com/articles.php

Now Google can pick out three obvious keywords: ’socks’, ‘dogs’, and ‘articles’. The sheer volume of results from searching for general terms like these will not get you on the first page of results. Wouldn’t it be great to give Google some more information about what this URL actually stands for? Something more understandable, containing specific keywords relating to the article, would be far more effective.

The Solution

This is much more Google friendly:

http://www.socksfordogs.com/articles/Fleece-Ultra/Cleaning/

Google can now pick out references to ’socks’, ‘dogs’, ‘articles’, ‘fleece’, the ‘Fleece Ultra’ name, and ‘cleaning’. This type of reference will bring much more specific results than the three keywords we were able to identify before.

According to my research, Google is less receptive to dynamic URL’s, such as URL’s containing obscure data references or numerical ID’s. To evaluate this I have monitored over 35,000 hits to one of my sites, and watched Google soak up keywords on friendly formatted URLs for 24 different articles, while dropping the complex URLs entirely in favor of their friendly counterparts.

Implementing friendly URLs can range from simple to very complex. In order to fully utilize friendly URLs on a dynamic, database driven web site takes intelligent programming and rigorous optimization of spoken word identifiers.

Conclusion

Just like keywords in META tags, friendly URLs are not the decisive factor in search engine results. Many high-profile sites maintain healthy traffic with very complex URL mechanisms. If you want to maximize your search results, and especially if you don’t have the ’staying power’ with search engines that huge corporations do, it is still a very important part of a complete SEO campaign.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2004 at 7:19 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.