Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [158]
www.website.com/?id=4&cat=17&prodid=15 reflects the additional information being requested as the visitor drives deeper into the content of the website. The database is pulling additional information to show a page that has more information and additional classification. To follow the example, this page would most likely be a specific brand or type of running shoe.
www.website.com/?id=4&cat=17&prodid=15&detail=45 would reflect the product-level page. The additional parameters in the URL at this point may be reflected in the breadcrumb trail as Shoes > Running Shoes > Cross-Trainers > Brand Name, because the URL has built by the selection of the visitor. However, at this point, there are many parameters in the URL. A parameter is usually marked by the equal sign. Too many of these, and there may be a problem with the search engines.
With a simple database like this, it would be fairly easy to construct rewrite rules to translate the URLs as follows:
www.website.com/?id=4 to www.website.com/shoes/
www.website.com/?id=4&cat=17 to www.website.com/shoes/running-shoes/
www.website.com/?id=4&cat=17&prodid=15 to www.website.com/shoes/running-shoes/adidas
Of course, this is a very crude and simplistic example, but it provides an entrance to a world that digital marketers need to understand. As the URL becomes more complicated and encumbered with symbols, letters, equal signs, and various other characters, it also creates additional difficulty for the search engine. The more complicated the database, the more complicated constructing logical rules for a rewrite will become. This just isn’t a plug-and-play solution, as some marketers would prefer, and giving your IT department or programmer some leeway in timing and reacting to this request is recommended.
Simply having additional characters will not make your site bad for the search engines. There are many factors, and it is always recommended to take the measurement steps outlined in Monday’s assignment and in Chapter 4 to be sure that the URLs are actually the culprit. There are many factors in the technical side of marketing a website, and you need to be sure you have correctly diagnosed the primary problem before taking drastic measures.
Consider the Site’s Database Type and Scripting Language
If a rewrite is in your future, than educating yourself as to the type of rewrite is a recommended activity; otherwise, your IT department will make fun of you.
You will need to know what type of database your website employs and the language used to interact with the database. There are two primary databases types that split the web development industry: there is the side of the industry that uses Microsoft technology, and there is the side of the industry that doesn’t. There are a few other exceptions such as Sun and Oracle, but Microsoft SQL (the branded Microsoft database) and MySQL (the open source Linux version) make up the majority of database use.
To get the information out of the database, a scripting language is necessary to create the web pages. For sites using a Microsoft SQL database, the traditional languages that have been used to interface with the database are Classic ASP, ASP.NET, Visual Basic, and VB .NET. For these languages, combined with Microsoft SQL, there is usually a rewrite solution available. On Microsoft IIS servers, there are many options available, with IASAPI filters, a module called mod-rewrite, and Microsoft URL Rewrite Module 2.0 being a few of them. In addition, ASP.NET has a context-Rewrite module that will allow for creating rewrite rules.
In the open source world, which is dominated by Linux, the server runs on a program called Apache, and the typical database used is MySQL. The primary language used to pull the information out of the database and structure it is called PHP. The cost of developing in MySQL and PHP is much lower, because there are no licensing fees, and access to these resources is free. In PHP,