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The URL is the first thing a search engine can see for each and every page of your website, thus optimising it should be one of the most important tasks when starting to optimise your website for search engines. It is pointless to try and optimise a website without allowing search engines easy access to your site and all its content.
URL Canonicalization Now I can hear some of you saying what is canonicalization? This is a term that was created by Google, it is the process of selecting the best URL where there are several available for the same resource. The following can be used to access the same page: - www.website.com.au
- website.com.au
- www.website.com.au/index.htm
- website.com.au/default.php
To a search bot all these URL’s are different, but we know they will all point to the same thing. There are some methods that can be used to get past this: - Create a 301 on your webserver such that if ever anyone requests website.com.au then it will automatically redirect them to www.website.com.au
- Create all your internal links with the same base URL, for example, do not use www.website.com.au for the home page then use http://website.com.au on the rest of your pages.
Dynamic URL Optimisation Most people think of URL’s with lots of special characters and symbols when asked about dynamic URL’s. This does not necessarily have to be the case, and the truth of the matter is that search engines themselves do not like crawling sites with too many parameters in their URL.
There are many programs that are readily available that can help you turn your ugly dynamic URL into an nice clean and REMEMBERABLE URL, for example, http://www.website.com.au?category=34&product=32 can be easily converted into http://www.website.com.au/climbing/gloves with some simple database calls.
This is not only user friendly, but you can also add keywords into your URL that will add to the keyword density of a page but not affect the keyword frequency.
Happy Hunting Space Cowboys. |
