Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [157]
Do My URLs Need Work?
A caveat to this discussion on URLs is that the logical URL is not always necessary, especially if your site is doing well with both search engines and visitors. The evaluation methods in Chapter 4 should provide a good understanding of whether a change to your website’s structure is in order.
If your website is doing well, then the search engines have indexed your website, and most of your pages are showing up in a search for your site (see Chapter 4). If your website is indexed and has good rankings, then a change to a logical URL could cause more problems than possibilities. I recommend staying with something that is working, because creating new logical URLs may create major changes in the way search engines index your pages.
Here’s a quick checklist to know whether changing to logical URLs is the right move for you:
1. Your site has little to no rankings.
2. Very little of your traffic is generated from the search engines.
3. Your URLs are complicated and long.
4. Your Webmaster Tools reports shows that most of your pages have not been indexed, and none of the pages with the long, complicated URLs have been indexed.
If your site meets all of these factors, then rewriting your URLs to logical URLs may be the remedy. However, it is not a simple process, and many factors will determine how easily this can be accomplished. The method to create a logical URL is called a rewrite and will be covered next.
Tuesday: Understand URL Rewrites
A URL rewrite is the method of taking a complex URL and translating it using words that are understandable to the visitor. A complex URL would look something like this:
www.website.com/?id=23678j&f=765
A rewritten URL would take the parameters listed after the domain, “translate” them, and rewrite the URL to display like this:
www.website.com/products/shoes
To understand the process of creating a rewrite, it is necessary to understand a little bit about databases. I find that many marketers will read about the rewrite or hear about it at a conference and then excitedly go to their IT department, demand that it be done that day, and expect it to answer all of their problems. The problem is that the IT department will most likely respond nicely but then promptly go back to whatever it was they were doing and ignore the request.
Rewriting a URL is not a simple matter, especially if the website has been around for a number of years. Using a logical URL is one of those functions that is much easier to plan at the beginning of a development project than after the website has been launched. It requires that the database be structured in a method that will enable the logical URLs to be created.
The Basics
A simple way to understand a database’s relation to the content of the site is to look at a very basic sample URL structure (before rewriting):
www.website.com/ is the root level of the website. Most often, this is where the home page is located.
www.website.com/?id=4 The “?id=4” is a typical database inquiry that resides in the URL. This is a variable that requests a specific data field, or record from the database, which is then displayed to the visitor. The parameter "id=" is the instruction for the server to present the information found in record 4. Each number (or parameter) contains information from a specific record that has been entered into the database. The page that displays to the visitor is built using the information from this record in the database. Typically, the record at this level is usually a high-level or general category, like shoes.
www.website.com/?id=4&cat=17 requests additional records of information from the database to be displayed on the page. The addition of another variable (&cat=17) is most likely a subcategory. So, if