Webmaster Blog

One of the biggest requests here is for SEO articles, so finally I’m going to start on the band wagon and give some useful tips to get your website high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

The first thing to realise with SEO is that you want to take full advantage of every possible place you can in terms of relevant keywords.  This includes your URLs

Search Engine Optimising URLs

The first thing to understand with URLs / links is that if you can’t read them and get a small insight as to what the page is about, how will the Search Engines?  Sure the crawlers will pick up the content on the page but they do take the URL keywords into account!

So, you want relevant keywords in your URL, not /page.php?id=1

Let’s say you have a website about vehicles.  Each vehicle  is listed under the categories for ‘type’ and ‘manufacturer’.

You have a page for a Ferrari F430 Spider under the category “Ferrari”.  A search engine optimised URL for this would be something like:

chuckunvehicles.com/sports-cars/ferrari/ferrari-f430-spider.htm – See the hyphens (-) in between the words? It’s always a good idea to use hyphens in URLs.  Why?  Well simply to define your actual keywords… If you didn’t use hyphens, a search engine crawler may read this as “sportscars” and “ferrarif430spider” – See the problem?  We want to define our keywords without mistake or misinterpretation!

Also, notice the order of the categories? It’s only sensible to make sure your categorised URLs are in a logical hierarchy!  This shows search engines that the page is under ferrari, which is under sports-cars.  You want to build understandable relevance with your URLs.

To create good SEO URLs without making each page individually you’ll need to know how to use Apache’s .htaccess file to retrieve the content.. I will write a post on .htaccess soon!

All the best with your SEO! Come back for more soon!

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