What Are Search Engine Friendly URLs And How Do They Help You?

The internet community of today is ruled by the search engine and if you want to survive in this virtual world and that too with some honor you’ve got to strive to be in the good books of the almighty search engines that can take you to the pinnacle of popularity or throw you down the abyss of non-identity. Hence, you have to design your web-based applications and any associated stuff with the aim of impressing the search engines. And you’ve got to be really good at that because the online world is teeming with hundreds of websites that are vying with each other for the attention of the very fastidious search engines.

A URL is a link to another web page. It is actually a query string written in a programming language that takes you to another website when you click on it. This is the only way you can navigate from one site to another and it is being used by the entire Internet community to divert network flow.

Earlier these URLs were not indexed by the search engines but, nowadays, with Search engine optimization being widely implemented they have started indexing the web pages. The search engines do not recognize them as a source to another website, but recognize them as dynamic links that are meant for some in-between navigation. If there are more such dynamic links the server might just crash or the dynamic links might just be moved up the search engine ranks at a very slow pace. The longer the dynamic link the greater the time it will take in climbing up the search engine optimized ranks ladder. The search engine will also move up these dynamic links only if it finds that these links are associated with a lot of incoming links.

Search engines also have problems with session ids as they do not allow it to index the URL efficiently and also can be misleading as they might result in a large number of URLs with the same numbers. All these factors lead to the search engines being detected by their HTTP-User_AGENT feature. These are being increasingly used in search engine optimized programming these days. But they should work properly.

An search engine friendly URL may look like http:// domainname.com/section/category/description_name.html

instead of

http://domainname.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=26

There are Content management systems like Joomla! that can present URLs that are inherently search engine friendly.

The long URLs are not user friendly and a user has a very tough time remembering these long, boring addresses. Hence, referring to these URLs with names was found to be with them is a better option. It is not only that they make remembering URLs an easy and interesting task but they also do not give away the type of server side scripting that is being used as they do not have the extensions of the server that is activated. Hence if you upgrade your server software anytime you need not change the URLs as they will now refer to the new server application that you are using. This opacity of the server address to the users and irrelevant programmers ensures enhanced protection for the server.

Search Engine and User Friendly URLs enhance the meaning and aesthetics of a website. Unfriendly program code does not fit in very well with the very user friendly and attractive graphical and textual content. After all, the purpose of programming is to present the most complex code and functionality in the most convenient and presentable manner.

Tags: Joomla!, SEF Url, SEO