User friendly Urls and SERP
Search engine friendly(SEF) urls have been around a while and the impact they have on Search Engine Results Page (SERP) cannot be neglected. Though some may argue as to its importance in search engine results, it is worth having since they come handy to make urls memorable and it’s at least a factor in search engine results ranking.
Personally, long and ugly web page url has been a concern to me not only because of SEO purposes but I also can’t seem to remember the urls of interesting articles I stumbled upon and didn’t have the chance to bookmark.
It’s a fact that search engine friendly urls do have an impact of your website ranking in SERP. The result could be seen on primarily two levels: 1. the domain level and 2. the sub directory level.
- The impact could be seen on the domain level www.domain.com… where your website could get a listing in the search result if the keyword that the user searched for appears in your domain. As a result, it’s important that one carefully chooses a sensitive domain name and not just any long boring domain name when it comes to choosing a domain for your website.
- The second impact is seen on the sub directory level. That is where the searched keyword appears in your page url other than the domain. When it happens this way, the searched keyword gets highlighted in the search result. Of course this makes it more trustworthy for the site visitor since they can see the keyword in the SERP snippet.
For example, searching for website design agency ghana gets Kava Media listed as per the result page because there are pages within our website that have some of these keywords in the url.
As a website design and development company, we want our clients to not just be in business but have value added to their business through their website. As such we do our best as a company to leverage every best possible feature and tool in the creation of websites for clients to enhance their online user experience and add value to their business. As a result, we updated our own content management systems to take SEF urls into account in the creation and management of website contents.
We are able to do this by enabling the URL rewriting module in Apache and routing every request to the an index page. It can be fun and tricky working with URL Rewriting as you must have Regular expressions as part of your arsenals when dealing with Mod_rewrite.
