What are SEO Friendly URLs and why are they so important

OK, we have had a couple of emails following on from our post about how to use SEO friendly urls in Wordpress on windows server using isapi rewrite asking what SEO Friendly URLs are and why they are important.

What it means

SEO Friendly URLs are simply URLs that contain keywords related to the page content.

Example 1

For example, the URL for this page is http://blog.outside5.com/2008/12/what-are-seo-friendly-urls-and-why-are-they-so-important/.

the domain
(http://blog.outside5.com/)

followed by the year and the month of the post
(2008/12/)

followed by the title of the post with all spaces replaced with hyphens
(what-are-seo-friendly-urls-and-why-are-they-so-important/)

The original URL for this page would have been http://blog.outside5.com/?p=39 which as you can see says nothing about what a search engine should expect to see on the page, but our new SEO friendly URL contains all the relevant keywords for the page.

Real Life Business Example

A page URL using category identifiers like www.myshop.com/products.cfm?cat=29&subcat=11 may link to your mens (category 29) long sleeved t-shirts (sub category 11), but it doesn’t tell Google what the page is about; there are no keywords.  It is possible to rewrite the URLs to read www.myshop.com/mens/long-sleeved-t-shirts.

If you have a website or online store that is not performing well with Google, get in touch with us to discuss what we can do to help you out.

Tags: SEO