What are search engine friendly urls?
When someone refers to search engine friendly URLs they are talking about web page addresses that are designed to be indexed easier by search engine crawlers. Many websites use dynamic content, which is HTML that is rendered in the browser on the fly instead of HTML stored in a static HTML file. This means that not only does the URL reference a fixed web address it also passes data to the software being run on the web server. This is used to create large websites without the hassle of making each web page one by one.
The problem with dynamic URLs is that search engines don’t like certain characters in URLs; this can create major issues with dynamically created websites. If a crawler removes certain data or strings from a URL a web page won’t be rendered correctly or maybe not even at all. This is where search engine friendly URLs come into play. By using rewritten URLs your web server knows that a certain URL really points to another, which means that web browsers or crawlers see one URL when really it’s being mapped server side to another. This is done using apache mode re-write or an IIS add on. Below are a few examples of a friendly URLs and not so friendly URLs.
Non-Search Engine Friendly URL Example
http://www.website.com/index.php?cat=website?page=1
Search Engine Friendly URL Example
http://www.website.com/cat/page/1/
Learning to correctly re-write urls can be a tricky task, many excellent guides are available on the internet and on Civic SEO. Always back-up your .htaccess file in case you have to revert back to old settings or make a mistake. Once your successfully transform your URLs into search engine friendly URLs not only will they look much cleaner they will also help index your site more efficiently. You’ll also see better search engine rankings due to keywords and keyword phrases that can be injected into the URLs.