SEO help - number 2, Search Engine Friendly navigation and URL structure

URL structure and friendly navigation can make some of the biggest difference in your site getting indexed and getting points.

In the old days a dynamic site had to use dynamic query URLs like: http://www.sylviatrager.com/cgi-bin/fh1_2.cgi?Autoincrement=195

That told the site to execute that .cgi file, and show record number 195.  Not very pretty.  And, completely meaningless to the search engine.

Current Content Management Systems (CMS) like Joomla, wordpress, and others; allow you to use Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLS like ours shown in the image to the left.

What used to be: http://webeddy.com/index.php?com_component=content&article_id=95

Can now be: http://webeddy.com/services/programming

What this means: Your url can tell the story, in the above example, programming is a service of ours - and /services/ is a category on the site, and /programming/ is a sub-category of /services/

That was the technical way of saying: You should turn on search engine friendly URL's in your CMS driven site, it will have a big impact.

Get the MOST out of it: By using smart menu items, put down in a smart way, you will get the full potential of this feature.  If you are a service business, have an item called services, and if you have a few services, put them as child menu items.

If you have products, it might make sense to have a products item, with /products/items or /products/categories.

Using this method you can also EASILY tell the search engines which category to entirely ignore using robots.txt.

Have fun!

-- This article outlines one of the 20+ things we audit and correct when we have an SEO (search engine optimization) engagement for a client website. --  This is of course available as a service, call us or email to find out more.

-Troy Anderson