With the ever increasing usage of dynamic content management systems (CMS) to power websites, webmasters have been looking for ways to make their URLs look better. We refer to these type of URL’s as “search engine friendly” URLs, but they are also user friendly as well since they give an indication of what the page/post is about. Search engines prefer static URLs to dynamic URLs, but why? The fact is that the way that dynamic URLs are created they can sometimes create nightmares in the area of SEO. Search engines do not like to index dynamic URLs and there are various reasons for this, one of them being the non-standard characters like ?, &, %, =, and such in the URL.
A standard dynamic URL that is produced from PHP, a server-side scripting language, may look like this, seohosting.co.uk/index.php?category=name&234845345u4-this-one-274763. This format however is not very user or SE friendly but by using technology like Apache’s mod_rewrite module, your page/post can have a URL that looks more like, seohosting.co.uk/seohosting-co-uk-gets-a-new-look-and-feel. This is now quite easy to achieve, especially with blogging platforms such as WordPress.
There are several reason why this should be important for you to implement these SEO friendly URLs:
People Want To Link To A Certain Page On Your Site
Sometimes when people may want to link to your website and they will use the URL as the anchor text in that link. For that reason alone you should be using SEO friendly URLs since most likely you have placed your keywords in your SEO friendly URL like below:
http://www.seohosting.co.uk/most-popular-seo-hosting-plans
Look and Feel of the URLs
When you have not so nice looking URLs it can cause visitors to be weary of your site as it may throw up red flags in some peoples eyes as it may look like a “bad” site to visit. People may even think “hummm I wonder if I will get a virus if I visit this site?” I can only assume that many people probably feel this way about seeing such “ugly” URLs, so don’t scare away your visitors just change the way you
Copy And Pasting
Finally, we have all seen what can happen to URLs that are too long. Someone tries copy and paste the URL but for whatever reason, the URL gets broken during the transmission or formatting process, and it’s basically a dead link. So don’t limit your exposure with URLs that can “break down” and are hard to
So in order to effectively use this technology, you need to make sure that your website has mod_rewrite enabled. If you do not currently have a hosting provider or if you are looking for a new one then you should make sure to find a hosting provider that has experience with blog hosting and that has mod_rewrite and other important features like it enabled by default.
