I recently traveled to visit a friend who I had not seen since college. I had been looking forward to the trip for quite some time. My driving directions consisted of a few scribbled lines on a post-it note, which I barely glanced at prior to leaving. And I soon realized that beyond the major interstate highways, my directions not only failed to reflect the quickest route to my friend’s home, but they had me totally lost.

Now, I had spent the entire week prior to my trip thinking about what my buddy and I were going to do during my visit. But I had completely overlooked an equally important aspect of the trip – concise, easy to follow directions on how to get there.

Finding Their Way

This same oversight is often the case with search engine marketers. They focus exclusively on optimizing the content of their site – much like I was focused on the “content” of my visit. But in the process, they overlook one of the most important aspects of any successful search marketing campaign – URL naming convention.

Research shows that URL naming convention is one of the leading factors in determining where a website ranks within the search results. The URL is one of the first places a spider will crawl. Concise, keyword-centric URLs are just like well written directions in that they efficiently provide the needed information. The spider, much like a traveler in a strange town, will know exactly what the page is about and which keyword phrases are associated with it.

Gridlock

Dynamically-produced URLs are great for large retail sites with lots of constantly changing content. However, when it comes to gaining visibility in the major search properties, dynamic URLs encounter the following issues when attempting to provide those clear and concise directions the spiders need:

• Search engine spiders cannot read dynamic characters such as “?”, “=,” and “&” found in dynamically generated URLs. Most spiders will stop crawling the site when they hit the first dynamic character and will attempt to index the portion of the URL that it has read up until that point. So often the URL that’s indexed will not reflect an actual page on the site, resulting in nothing being indexed.
  
  
• Other websites are less willing to link to dynamic URLs because they are viewed as URLs that may change or become broken over time. Link popularity is therefore affected
  
  
• With the generation of dynamic URLs, the possibility exists for the same content to be indexed in search engines multiple times with different URLs each time. This could cause the site to be punished for duplicate content. 

Step-by-Step

Implementing “static” URLs is one way to avoid these issues and improve the online visibility of your website. Static URLs are clear, concise, unchanging and are easy for search spiders to crawl. Be sure to include your targeted keyword phrases within the text of the URL, because the keyword phrase helps the spider determine what the page is about. Additionally, the closer the keyword phrase appears to the domain name the better the chance the page has of gaining visibility.

Follow these directions when writing static URLs that you want search engine spiders to easily read and index: 

• Pages/URLs should not be deeper than three levels/categories
  
  
• URLs should be no longer than 50 characters
  
  
• Keyword phrases within URLs should be separated by hyphens not underscores
  
  
• URLs should contain less than three hyphens 

For example, beginning with the sub domain, a static URL should look like this:

http://sub-domain.domain.com/category-kwd/primary-kwd.html

Now, dynamic URLs can be indexed, but research has shown that the majority of pages that gain top rankings are static and keyword-centric. However, there are ways to optimize dynamic URLs:

• Include one keyword phrase in each URL, as close to the domain name as possible.
  
  
• Remove the tracking from your URLs and use a Web analytics program to track conversions, traffic, etc. This allows the inclusion of keywords in the URL structure while still providing the tracking and measurement data your business requires.
  
  
• Utilize dynamic URL re-writing software in conjunction with your content management system.

Global Positioning System

In a perfect world, my car itself would have known the way to my friend’s house and I would have gotten there in a flash. And in a perfect world, search engine spiders would read and understand every word on your website and fully understand what it’s about. The truth is, we usually have to provide technology with a helping hand by providing it with good directions and removing any obvious obstacles that may get in its way. Do that, and access your site’s rich content, like the road to my buddy’s house, will be smoother and much more direct.