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Provocative

SE-Friendly URLs

“Click me!”

If the ideal URL could speak, its speech would resemble the communication of an

experienced salesman. It would grab your attention with relevant keywords and a call to action,

and it would persuasively argue that you should choose it instead of the other one. Other URLs

on the page would pale in comparison.

URLs are more visible than many realize, and are a contributing factor in CTR. They are often

cited directly in copy, and they occupy approximately 20% of the real estate in a given search

engine result page. Apart from “looking enticing” to humans, URLs must be friendly to search

engines. URLs function as the “addresses” of all content in a web site. If confused by them, a

search engine spider may not reach some of your content in the first place. This would clearly

reduce search engine friendliness.

Creating search engine friendly URLs becomes challenging and requires more forethought when

developing a dynamic web site. A dynamic web site with poorly architected URLs presents numer-

ous problems for a search engine. On the other hand, search engine friendly URLs containing rele-

vant keywords may both increase search engine rankings, as well as prompt a user to click them.

This chapter discusses how well-crafted URLs can make the difference between highly ranked web

pages and pages at the bottom of the search results. It then illustrates how to generate optimized

URLs for dynamic web sites using the Apache mod_rewrite module in coordination with applica-

tion code written in PHP. Lastly, this chapter considers some common caveats — and addresses how

to avoid them.

By the end of this chapter you will acquire the skills that will enable you to employ search engine

friendly URLs in a dynamic PHP-based web site. More specifically, in the rest of this chapter you will:

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Understand the differences between static URLs and dynamic URLs.

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Understand the benefits of URL rewriting.

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