SEO Consult Blog

In the land of search engine optimisation, a lot of people talk about SEO URL’s, whilst only a few people will actually give you a good definition of how to create them. This blog is going to be quite a technical one, so not for the feint hearted, but is a procedure any SEO worth his cost should be able to undertake without so much as batting an eyelid. Search engine friendly urls tend to adjust ugly querystring based urls like:

http://www.example.com/index.php?id=939398
to
http://www.example.com/a-great-detailed-example.html

Giving you the great benefit of not only appearing more relevent in the search engien results, but also having a more memorable and meaningful address for the end user.

Search engine friendly url’s take many forms, for example in this wordpress install they call themselves permalinks, when used in a seo perspective they are called Search Engine Friendly URL’s, however in essense all of different names you can think of rely on one of the most handy features of the Apache Web Server….. Mod_rewrite.

Mod_rewrite is a module which is loaded into the web server when required for website execution, and it takes its input and translates it through a RewriteRules into the output which is passed to the designated script.

Still with me? Now I have introduced the most important aspect of the Search Engine Friendly URL, I am going to give you the 3 step process to enabling you to ensure your unfriendly Query String turns into a nice rememberable and keyword rich URL.

1. Adjust your scripts to output the new search engine friendly and keyword rich links within your website
2. Turn on the RewriteEngine and create the relevent RewriteRules.
3. Amend the input of your websites scripts to recieve the new data format and convert it into an internally recogniseable variable

It is with these 3 simple steps you will find your web addresses becoming more memorable, and meaningfull to yourself, and boosting your website from obscurity in a matter of weeks.

If you would like SEO Consult to use our in house expertise to rewrite your URL’s, why not contact us

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