What are search engine friendly URL’s and why should your website have them? A search engine friendly URL is one that is easily readable by search engines and is no more than 2 dynamic parameters in length. An example of a not so search engine friendly URL, here is an example of one from the Utah Staffing Agency Strategic Staffing:

http://jobs.strategicstaffs.com/index.php?mode=apply&jobid=112206.1

Here is a better example of one coming from the UVSC website for the college here in Utah County:

http://www.uvsc.edu/visitors/aboutuvsc/mission.html

Can you see the difference? One has much more for a search engine to read off of while the other one is just full of characters and numbers that mean absolutely nothing to search engines. Search Engineers have confirmed on many occasions that URL’s with more than 2 dynamic parameters may not be crawled unless that page is significant importance. In the case with Strategic Staffing, Google or any other major search engine does not view their page or their website of any “significant importance”.  So make sure you have Search Engine Friendly URL’s.

Special Tip:

Earlier last week I wrote about anchor text in your inbound links and the importance of what is in that anchor text. With search engine friendly URL’s, sometimes the URL itself has anchor text that is sufficient. Sometimes when this is the case, when you simply just copy and past your URL links into places like forums, blogs, and other online venues you are getting anchor text type benefit. Let me give you an example:

http://chasesagum.com/drupal-ubercart-simple-shopping-cart

This link here can be placed all over the internet by itself with no anchor text and still reap “anchor text” type benefits. It already does. This page alone is proof in the pudding. This link alone (blog post) gets 40 visits per day and is on page 1 of Google for the term “drupal shopping cart”. In case you were wondering, nearly every single one of those 40 hits daily come form Google. This webpage is also on page 1 of Google for “Ubercart Shopping Cart” and so on. You get the picture.

So make sure to rewrite your URL’s to search engine friendly URL’s that contain words within them that describe your particular webpage. Doing so will benefit you greatly on the Search Engines.