Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Any good webmaster has heard of Search Engine Friendly URL’s, but really what are they?

Early in search engine design, Google, Yahoo and the like preferred:

http://www.mysite.com/mysite.html

instead of

http://www.mysite.com/mysite.cfm?id=123&product=12312&state=MI.

While the site was being indexed, the “spiders” would get lost and not all the pages would be indexed. As search engines improved, so did spidering technology and this became less of a problem.

However, as usability became more prevalent on the web, the extremely long and clumsy url’s became harder for users to remember, easier methods had to be created to change “?id=12312345123&product=12312325415&state=MI” into “michigan-products”. As any good SEO and Webmaster knows, Cool URI’s never change. This is where URL rewriters comes in.

If you are running Apache on your webserver, this is standard and can be accomplished using the mod_rewrite rule within .htaccess. If you are running IIS, you can purchase a nice little application known as ISAPI_rewrite and this works within httpd.ini.

Both of these products let you create rules that run on top of your web server to transform extremely complicated URI’s into delicious bite size morsels that your users can understand and more easily remember.

Enjoy!