Flat Links
All the way back in my first article, Where to Start, I talked about how registering a domain name containing your website’s keywords is important. Well having the keywords in the complete URL to the page is also helpful.
The URL of the page you’re on now for example: http://www.cashsblog.com/2009/01/flat-links/. It contains to year, month, then title of the article. This can give search engines a better idea of what the page is about. Have you ever seen URLs like http://www.cashsblog.com?read_article.php?year=2009&month=01&key=120&title=flat-links and thought “What the hell does that mean?”
Why would you want “Flat Links?”
These kinds of URLs are easier for the person who created the page. The URL tells the page exactly what article it needs from the database and the variable key only needs a quick is_numeric check. But the problem is, sometimes search engine bots can make as much sense out of them as a human (not very much). A search engine bot might not be able to (or might choose not to) follow a link with too many GET variables in it.
Having a descriptive URL not only gives the user more information on where they are, but search engines too. If your URL is descriptive, and even better, contains keywords relating to the page, it’s going to get a better search engine rank.
How does it work?
So what do you do about it? You can use a little Apache web server trick to make what are called flat links.
Basically, you can set up redirects that don’t actually redirect the browser. Apache actually translates the URL without the user ever knowing.
So what’s actually happening, when your browser requests something like this article: http://www.cashsblog.com/2009/01/flat-links/ is that Apache detects the pattern /(4 digit number)/(2 digit number)/(article title)/ and translates that to index.php?year=(4 digit number)&month=(2 digit number)&title=(article title), ready for index.php to use those variables to get the correct article from the database.
(Wordpress actually uses another technique, but we’re using this pages URL for this example.)
So you want to find out how to do all this?
Check out: more .htaccess tips and tricks..
(This is actually the toutorial I read to learn how to do this.)
Related posts:
- Using www. Could Be Decreasing Your Rank If you’ve used WebsiteGrader, you might’ve noticed the section mentioning...
- (Almost) 1 Year On – What have I learnt? I’ve been doing this websites thing for almost 1 year....
- Your Homepage, Make It Count Most of the time, when you visit a website, the...
- What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Now you’ve got the domain name. I’m going to assume...
- Where to Start So you’ve decided your not satisfied with working 40 hours...
I really learned a lot from this very informative article! Keep up the great work Cash!