SEO BLOG

I think the most stuff is obviously, but it can’t be said enough.

So, nice list that upgrades every little SEO cheat sheet. :)

Hm, bad SEO advisory maybe? Everyone publishing a website sooner or later deals with ”can i be googled“ and when you involve people that don’t have a clue on that then … bah, what do I care? NYT should know it better.
And no, I’m no SEO pro, wooh …

Great post. .NET has the same issues with their URLs as PHP. Many a software developer needs to rethink (or start thinking of) URLs in their web sites.

Yer nice re-design, very clean yet effective!
I hadnt really pondered these URL ideas before, great insight.

SEO is just a bit of competition and all admins come at it differently and using different tools and CMS’s so the url results vary. Yes, its obvious, but no, URL’s where not all created equal. Throw alternate language in the mix, old cms constructs, bad programming and you get a non-level playing field, hopefully good for those who want to do this right and win at SEO.

I personally hate when people use dates in the URL. Personally I think its a waste of spaces and is useless information.

And I like what you said about spoken language instead of numbers. I run into that a lot. Stuff like /set1/image1.jpg and /set25/image006.jpg

Neither tell the user or the search engine anything about what they’re going to see.

Good post.

Until I started getting involved in SEO I never considered any of this. In fact, someone once complemented me on my massive URLs with session IDs and GUIDs because he said that it looked complicated and so I must be earning my money!

Bu stepping back and looking at it like a normal human being – the URL can tell you so much and can be as important, or even more important, than the title. If I get to tinyurl preview and the URL looks dull then I won’t read the article.

Great tips Tad – keep up the excellent work on the blog!

Sound advice!

WordPress gets point number ten (changing a URL) correct automatically too, at least in version 2.5.

So what are we webdevelopers supposed to do on internationalized sites? You know, the ones in English, German and French? We got everything: nice, clean URLs and content negotiation so all users see the same URL but get it in their own language.

Should we rather use ugly internationalized URLs in the form /en/2008/google-files-for-bankruptcy/ and /de/2008/google-files-for-bankruptcy/? Does Google do content negotiation at all? I’ve been looking forever for information on this but haven’t found much to go on…

Thanks for any pointers.

This is really helpful!

I think you have mentioned the 10 most important factors to be considered when settinng up a new website. Good work!

That’s a good point about the hyphen. Actually there’s been some debate about whether underscores also apply… the consensus seems to be that the engines are starting to recognize underscore, but to err on the side of caution, stick with the hyphen.

These points cannot be emphasized too often and your post is an excellent expression of what’s important. You’ve got them all and made it clear and simple.

Of course most of them are important for search engines rather than human visitors, however the question of accented letters becomes a major point of confusion for human visitors. Will it be the accented version or the non-accented version if they’re trying to remember the URL? I always encourage folk to try to work with words that don’t include accents to avoid that dilemma.

At times the worst part comes up when you already have your wordpress blog and changing soo many urls might need quite a few redirection. Why dont they give the
user this option of doing so during the time of installation.
These above resources are very good for anyone who starts their website.

I can’t believe you forgot the biggest one of all- URL’s that aren’t URL’s. In other words, if I cut and past the url of the page and send it to someone in an email, she doesn’t see the same page that I see. Even if the page came from a GET request. A LOT of php frameworks throw URL integrity out the window. and rails, and django.

yeah, I agree with all the points. I would just like to add one more thing. Its good to add a 404 custom error Page. This will, help you catch broken links and also let you visitors say inside the domain.

Amazing article, These are simple but most of us do such mistake. this article will surelly help in increasing my PR and visitors.

You’re right – the use of special character entities in post titles is really common. I wonder if Google has learnt to tune these out yet?

Justin: Sadly that doesn’t work in WordPress. When you update a post to the point where you republish it five years later you lose the old link and all people who have bookamrked it get a 404.

I do it all the time, updating old postings and either changing the date or not. In both cases the URL would break the user experience.

Either people wouldn’t notice the post is up to date because the new date is at the bottom of the post or the URL would change altogether and lose it’s position in Google etc.
You have to emply a 301 redirect then etc. Way too much fuss.

Just skip the date.

Just stumbled across this article whilst doing some research for a client – nice one!! I’m gonna recommend it as prime reading for many of my other clients now!!

As an SEO for a new(ish) UK SEO Company one of the first things I aim for is the title/keyword in the domain … I love the comments in Joomla & Mambo – I’m with you all the way !!

Are questionmarks in a url a problem?

Some great tips here. I didn’t know about StumbleUpon not accepting special characters in the links.

I will have to watch out because the pathauto for Drupal adds these types of characters into the URL when the characters exist in the Title’s of posts.

unfortunately, free blogs cant be modified to be more url friendly.

I do love reading through these older posts, so much has changed with ‘search’ (SEO) over the years but somethings never change..