We’ll start with this first lesson about Search Engine Optimization, and we start from the beginning from the website itself. There is many techniques that we’ll see in this part, and consideration that we should take in the first planning of a website development.
Many web developers take the Search Engine Optimization part as optional in a website develpment, while it should be included in the core of any website which want to take maximum profit on internet.
URLs
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a file (resource) accessible on the Internet. The type of resource depends on the Internet application protocol. Using the World Wide Web’s protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) , the resource can be an HTML page (like the one you’re reading), an image file, a program such as a common gateway interface application or Java applet, or any other file supported by HTTP.
So this is the first important information that we should optimize
Search engine friendly URLs
The first thing I’ll start with it is Search engine friendly URLs, why is it important, and how it could influence on Search Engine Optimization. First its the location of our content. If we make a good URL for a web page content it will be more easy to find it. Its the same thing as we have an adress of a place easy to guess. And we remember that we should make the difference between the website address itself and its content. So here we’ll focus on the content’s address and how search engine will find it better.
http://domain.com/web/index.php?aid=4&cid=7
This example of URL could be used, and you can have a website working with this but what if it was
http://domain.com/news/computers/article-title-here/4/7/
and both URLs refer to the same content. The difference is that in the second example our URL give 3 relevant informations, while the first it gives just one :
- Domain name
- Category ( which is news in this example )
- Article title ( which is article-title-here in this example )
More information mean more possibilities to find your article.
The cases to manage Search Engine Friendly URLs are very different from an application to another, and a news portal is different from a company website, from a shopping portal … etc. Every website can have its own optimizations techniques to allow you to put the maximum of informations in URLs.
Some developpers avoid using long URLs for the pretext that they’re difficult to remember. Be sure that nobody will remember the URL of an article, they just bookmark the page in the case its important, otherwise will open a search engine to find it again. That’s why we’re talking about Search Engine Optimization in these articles.
I’ll explain more in the next articles the different techniques for search engines friendly URLs, and we’ll continue with different part of website optimization.
