Optimizing Your URLs

Dynamic and Static URLs

A dynamic URL is most often used on a PHP or Javascript based site. It calls database content to fill a page template. This kind of URL relies on the database and variable strings in order to form a complete URL. You will often see these on blogs, forums and e-commerce sites, and they will usually look something like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=dae

A static URL doesn’t rely on variable strings. This allows it to stay stable throughout the site; they will normally look more like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/this-is-a-filename.html

The dynamic URL used as an example here is actually much shorter than many you will see. An overwhelming majority of the dynamic links that you will find online, especially in e-commerce stores, can have over eight question marks, thirty ampersands and a unbelievable amount of unidentifiable numbers.

You Must Optimize your URLs!

Dynamic URL’s are often indexed at a much slower pace than static URLs, and users follow suit. When viewing your page in a search engine, a user is more likely to click a link that has a recognizable URL string. This is ten times more likely to be a static URL such as one with the title of an article in the URL than one with question mark followed by a string of nonsense marks and numbers.

Search engines don’t like missing keywords, and they also identify session tags and variables as “stop signs” indicating something that could likely be ignored with no adverse effects. This could seriously damage your indexed page count. Static URLs are quite easy to optimize, and should be kept consistent with your title tags and your site as a whole for best results.

Try not to have more than 3 subdirectories in any URL. Use keywords in your URLs if you can. The best place for a keyword is in a subdirectory (such as the category or topic). If you want your page to be indexed by search engines, avoid session tags and variables to reassure the search engine spiders that they are indexing properly!

Following these tips combined with the information about title tags posted previously will greatly improve the speed and completeness with which the search engines index your site!