Your site's URL can determine SEO success

Uniform Resource Locator, or URL is the web address of a hyperlink. It is a unique code that helps a web browser to identify a particular page from billions of web pages floating in the online marketplace.

When it comes to search engine optimization, URLs can play a pivotal role in bringing your website on top of SERPs. This code is not just a location; it is the identity of a web page. Therefore, optimizing a URL is as important as working on other Meta Tags of your page.

SEO experts say that long URLs should always be avoided, especially when you name your homepage. Most search engines regard long names as spam because typing them is a tedious task for human beings. This is the reason why most SERPs do not show long names in their topmost listings.

It is advisable to use your main keywords in your site's URLs. However, be sure you are not engaging in keyword stuffing because search engines do not prefer such coding. Use a name that is logical and in syndication with the content on a page, or the product you are selling.

Search engine optimizers need to pay extra attention to their dynamic URLs. Pages that are frequently updated (shopping cart pages, news pages, etc.) should be clearly specified to a search engine, because their web addresses change almost everyday, and in some cases, many times in a day. Such pages can be identified with a '?' in their URLs.

Search engines usually prefer static pages over dynamic ones. For the latter, it is advisable to rewrite the URLs so that you get noticed by the search engine spider. Because, it would otherwise take months to get indexed and ranked time and again. However, the former will be automatically re-crawled by the spider and hence ranked better.

Certain search engines like Google do not prefer to index dynamic pages if they have more than two parameters in the URL. In fact, many search websites do not crawl such pages for fear of getting entangled in a web that alters at will. Google, for a fact, does not follow links that have session IDs embedded in them. In such cases, it is best to change your server code and use URL optimization to come out of this trap.

The most simple solution is - create static pages with hard-coded links to your important dynamic pages. By doing so, you can help your visitors in finding out a product-specific page. Always remember, the key to SEO success is being visible on, and accessible to search engines.

Source: http://users.search-o-rama.com/Article243372.htm