Optimizing URLs

Optimizing URLs: URL means Uniform Resource Locator and is the text in your browsers address bar. If you want search engines to better index your site, resulting in higher places on SERPs, you should start optimizing your URLs.

Although choosing good keywords for your filename will not dramatically increase your ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s) it could give you that extra edge over your competitors.

I wouldn’t consider changing them when you already have pages with high PR as changing your filenames will make you loose backlinks lowering your PR. But if you’re starting off and you want to do some simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you should definitely start with optimizing URLs.

Keywords in URLs

I suggest you use the same main keywords your webpage is optimized for as this should be the search phrase you want to rank high on. Broadening the range of keywords should not be done in an URL, this should be done in <h2> or <h3> tags or plain text.

Length of URLs

Keep your URLs as short as possible and try to remove all unnecessary folder names. The shorter the higher the keyword density and the better for your place on the SERPs. Also, the closer your main keywords are to the beginning of the URL the better.

Use Hyphens

Try not to use underscores (_) in URLs as the are not used as dividers by Google. Use hyphens, periods, or commas instead. I believe hyphens or dashes (-) are more user friendly and people might actually remember your URL easier that way. If you use underscore you will actually have to search on “keyword1_keyword2” to find your webpage. Using hyphens will allow your pages to be found using “keyword1 keyword2”.

Redirect non-www URLs

Make sure you’re not optimizing two sites. Some people prefer to link to you without the www, while others don’t know any better than using www. Search engines still see www and non-www sites as to different websites and your PageRank will be split up between the two. You don’t want this to happen.
If you are using an Apache website and you can alter the .htaccess file you can direct all URLs to use www or you can automatically remove www. I prefer to use www as it is still used by most people.
Here’s how to rewrite your URLs to use www only (try it on this site and see what happens):

Dynamic sites and SE friendly URLs

Most sites nowadays use dynamic pages loading in data from databases. Most times data is called by using an id, which mostly is a number or code. Like the following URL:

http://www.somedomain.com/content.php?id=123456

Search engines don’t index these pages well as the URL is meaningless and holds no descriptive keywords. Besides that, some search engines don’t even read past the “?” and all pages called from the database using the different id’s will not be indexed.

You can use your .htaccess file to rewrite static URLs to dynamic URLs:

http://www.somedomain.com/123456/descriptive_keywords.php

could ‘secretly’ point to:

http://www.somedomain.com/content.php?id=123456

using the following code:

Do a search on “mod_rewrite” to find out more about optimizing URLs using htaccess and dynamic pages.