In 2 Lines: Optimize Your URLs With Dynamic Content:
Search engines like Google weigh heavily the content of URL keywords and structure. A URL like
"domain.com/page.asp?Id=5&SubmissionDate=4152006" won't be too friendly to a search bot - OR a human.
Sites like www.digg.com have this type of SEO in place: each news item, for example, has a URL that includes (part of) the title of
the news item in it. You can do this with your site's dynamic content very easily.
If you have a lot of articles, maybe a database of recipes, or some type of dynamic, user-generated content that you want to rank
high in the search engines, this method will work very well! iWEBTOOL's article pages use a similar - but not exact - method.
If you run your website on a Linux server with Apache, you can make a file called ".htaccess" and stick it in your public_html
directory.
In that file, put the following 2 lines, as an example:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^recipe/(.*)$ /recipe.php?id=$1
This is the code taken from www.foodalicious.com's .htaccess file. It makes the recipes have friendly URLs. Example:
http://www.foodalicious.com/recipe/Apple_Cinnamon_Pancakes
Here's what those 2 lines of text actually do:
1. First you have to turn on the Rewrite Engine. That's easy to do.
2. ^ means at the end of the domain part of the URL, so www.foodalicious.com/ in this case. Thus,
^recipe/
Means: www.foodalicious.com/recipe/
The best part? The directory "recipe" does NOT need to exist - in fact, it shouldn't. So we've gotten that far, now we need to get
the dynamic part of the URL in somehow. That is done with: (.*)$
The $ means the end of the friendly URL. Now, we need to tell Apache what script to run to get the dynamic content. Basically, in
this case, it replaces:
foodalicious.com/recipe.php?id=4
And makes it this:
foodalicious.com/recipe/Name_of_recipe
So we need to put recipe.php in the public_html directory. Of course, this is the file that actually displays the recipe.
Therefore, the next part of our .htaccess file tells Apache what file to actually execute:
/recipe.php?id=$1
$1 simply means the first variable in the query string of the URL... so if you had:
file.php?a=3&id=2
Then, $1 would return "3" and $2 would return "2".
That's pretty much all there is to it. It's very easy, and although this is a basic example, it can be applied numerous ways.
The only things you need to filter from the URL are wierd characters like punctuation, and spaces. Replace spaces with a _
character, usually.
Enjoy the high search engine ranking!
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