Friendly URLs May 8, 2007
Posted by Stray Dog in : Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google , trackbackI wish I had kept better track of my usage stats from years gone by for one of my sites. I’ve moved hosts a few times and never thought back then about potentially trying to monetize the site. It is full of original content on learning about web development and I get a reasonable amount of traffic. But I’m sure I used to get far more traffic.
The site started with static HTML pages and that was the way I went for several years. Then I got interested in Content Management Systems (CMS) and decided to roll my content into a Mambo setup. It worked well enough but has SO much going on I spent more time fidgeting with tweaking the interface than developing more good content. Last year I decided to roll my own CMS that provided me with exactly what I need and nothing more. I’m very please with where I have it now except that I was feeding an id number to my application page via the query string and the URL had no reference to all the juicy good content contained on the page. Bad Dog! Bad!
So this week I set out to fix my bad. I used a rewrite within my htaccess file for my site and updated my links site wide. Since the site is fully database driven this was easy and quick to do, although for all images and relative links within my own site I needed to change the path to stem from the sites root directory. This took a bit longer to do but not a big deal.
My stumbling block for not having done this earlier was getting my mind around how to setup the htaccess file properly with the rewrite rules. Fortunately I found a site that allows you to enter a dynamic URL and converts it to a Search Engine friendly one. It also spits out what you need to include in the htaccess file for all of it to work. Once I saw this I was able to get my mind around the process.
Now my content rich site has Search Engine friendly URLs and I look forward to seeing what sort of traffic increases I may get as a result. I will keep a better archive of sites stats as well as I move forward with this.
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