Using SEO Friendly URLs For Better Search Results

Dynamic URL vs. SEO Friendly URL

By default, Wordpress names its URL with a dynamically generated sequential number. The
number is placed after the domain name and looks something like
http://www.johnchow.com/?p=1508. To Google, this doesn’t mean anything. Google will have
to spider my content to figure out what the article is about. Contrast this with
http://www.johnchow.com/new-ad-network-auctionads/. With this SEO friendly URL, Google
can figure out immediately what the article is about. I have a much better chance of showing up
in the search engine results page using a SEO friendly URL than a dynamic one.

Turning On SEO Friendly URL

To turn on SEO friendly URL, go to Options in your Wordpress control panel and choose
Permalinks. From there you have four choices for displaying your URL: Default, Date and name
based, Numeric, and Custom. You will want to use Date and name based or custom because they
are the most search engine friendly. I use the custom setting for my URLs - it shows my domain
name followed by the post name. The custom structure to do it this is /%postname%/


Setting The Preferred Domain

Most websites can be reached with two addresses. One address has the www in it, like
http://www.johnchow.com, while the other address has the www missing; http://johnchow.com.

From a SEO standpoint, it is better to pick one domain format and stick with it. This way you
don’t have Google giving separate PageRank for two URLs that point to the same page. The
easiest way to do this is by logging into your Google Webmaster Tools account and setting a
preferred domain.

The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages
(sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site
using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance,
http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version
that you want used for your site in the search results.

Once you specify your preferred domain name, it may help determine PageRank for your
site more accurately.

Adding a 301 Redirect

After you set the preferred domain, you should force everyone to use this domain with a 301
redirect. You do this by editing your root .htaccess file. I want everyone visiting John Chow dot
Com to do so with the www in the URL. To force this, I open my .htaccess file and enter the
following codes:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.johnchow\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.johnchow.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You will need to replace johnchow.com with your site URL. What the above does is redirect all
johnchow.com to www.johnchow.com.

By maintaining one preferred domain format, you ensure linking consistency. If you have 10
sites linking to your article with a www and another 10 sites linking without the www, you
present Google with two pages, which will not receive the same weight as 20 sites linking to the
preferred domain. The .htaccess code will ensure that everything goes to the domain format you
want.

Note - the .htaccess redirect works only on Linux servers with the Apache Mod-Rewrite module
enabled.