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A picture is worth a thousand words.... and a few dollars! 11/21/2008 3:35:24 PM see topic |
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How can you not take credit cards at a trade show? 3/6/2008 5:12:21 PM see topic |
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Pedestrian Counters 3/4/2008 11:43:34 AM see topic |
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How to minimize online fraud and abuse of marketing promotions 2/22/2008 5:44:23 PM see topic |
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more... |
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URL Rewriting |
Posted by
Ken at 2/28/2008 8:44:25 PM
Ken Kilar is a skilled programmer and respected executive manager. Ken works with high-end databases, architects, builds and interfaces high availability e-Commerce and Business Information systems. Ken has a proven track record (both vision and development skills) to conceptualize and deliver complex technology solutions.
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From what I have heard and read from today's top Search Engine Optimization Experts (bahahahaha!), the semi-intense maintenance task of URL Rewriting (a.k.a. friendly or clean URLs) could be worth the effort. The word on this old subject is that search engines put some indexing weight to descriptive relevancy or keywords included within a URL. And some search engines altogether avoid complex URL structures that could result in loops and site overhead.
There are some security benefits to URL rewriting, and they look much cleaner, but I think the most compelling reason to create friendly URLs is that they're more useful to email and/or save if they have some obvious context to them. And it's pretty easy to do.
For a retailer, it makes sense to at least have your department and category URLs search engine friendly and clean. Departments and Categories don't change all that frequently, and most retailers don't have an unmanageable amount of them…. and category and department names are often popular search terms.
Looking at GAP's baby infant outfit category URL...
You can see that baby infant outfit category is 35358 (cid=35358), but a friendlier URL might be...
http://www.gap.com/browse/category/baby_outfits
(that will be $300 for my SEO consulting service, GAP)
I see that the top natural search positions from Google usually have some URL search content within the link, so it could be worth the effort of creating and maintaining the URL mapping. But why would GAP (and all their other brands) not be doing it? Have they not chatted with an SEO expert?
This simple 4 page site (created in C# .NET on the FREE SQL Server Express 2005) uses URL Rewriting. If you navigate to the previous post, you'll see the URL as…
http://retailbyte.com/how_to_minimize_online_fraud_and_abuse_of_marketing_promotions.aspx
However, the real link is…
http://retailbyte.com/?ThreadID=10
ASP.NET 2.0 features a limited, static URL Mapping tool. There are a lot of tips and downloads for creating extended HttpModules with Regex support, but your static category and department mapping project might not be too hampered without that functionality.
I downloaded UrlRewriter.NET and had everything running in just a few minutes. Read Scott Guthrie's blog post to get a good technical explanation of some of your URL rewrite opitions here.
If you're running on Apache, the mod_rewrite module is pretty sophisticated and seems to be what developers running IIS are chasing.
Agree? Disagree? Post a comment, or email me - maybe I can add some updates to this topic if I skipped something super important. |
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