Belchfire Search Engine Marketing

Well you came here for something. Here’s my number 1 recommendation. Everything else is secondary, short of actually submitting your URL to some search engines and getting a few people to link to you.

USE STATIC URLS

Sounds simple, but it isn’t. With all the bloggers, content management systems and content frameworks, this is the most overlooked aspect of search engine optimization. Almost all of these are dynamic in nature, meaning, server-parsed web pages such as ASP (Active Server Pages), CFM (Cold Fusion Markup Language) and PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) generate web page content dynamically from a backend database . Makes it easy to create and manage a website, but not so easy, if even possible, for search engines to figure out what is a web page and what isn’t.

Take these two web addresses:

http://www.domain.dom/foo.php?opt=today&start=noon&search&terms=bar+foo

http://www.domain.dom/todaysbbqracks-noon.html

Lets assume this is a directory listing on someone’s web site for bar foo BBQ racks. Perhaps an ecommerce site. And both pages are exactly the same.

What the heck is that first one? That’s basically what a search engine is going to ask, and will likely just ignore it altogether and move on. The second one? Why, that’s a web page of course.

Most search engines will recognize everything in the first URL up to the question mark as a valid URL. So the page they will try to index will be http://www.domain.dom/foo.php. But if that page is simply a search box, that’s all the search engine is going to index. Very few search engines take into account variables after the question mark, and those that do will only handle two or three variables. So even if a search engine does know a little about dynamic content, it might read the URL as http://www.domain.dom/foo.php?opt=today&start=noon&search, again, landing on a page that may not have any content on it at all.

Insulating search engines from these types of dynamic URLs will drastically improve both the number of pages they index on your site, and the relevance of the indexed pages.

So how exactly do you build static URLs on your web site? Well if considering a blogger or CMS, look for one that has this functionality built in already. One CMS that does is Mambo, but it’s off by default. WordPress includes this functionality in the CVS release if looking for a blogger.

If not using a CMS or blogger that support search engine friendly URLs, you can use modrewrite (Apache) or ISAPIRewrite (IIS) to rewrite your dynamic URLs to static URLs. More on that later. But here’s a real-world example of both a dynamic and a static URL for the same web page from Belchfire.net:

dynamic: http://www.belchfire.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=XP_Themes&file=index&do=top

static: http://www.belchfire.net/topthemes.html

Both are exactly the same web page. Most search engines skipped the dynamic URL altogether (Google pagerank 0/10). Only the static URL has been indexed by Google (pagerank 4/10).

Want proof? Of course you do. I love stats. Here are a few that can’t be ignored.

Dynamic URLs, Belchfire.net:
Robot | Hits | Bandwidth | Last Visit
Googlebot (Google) | 2883 | 444.49 MB | 31 Aug 2003 - 22:01

After converting to static:
Robot | Hits | Bandwidth | Last Visit
Googlebot (Google) | 57161 | 3.91 GB | 30 Sep 2003 - 23:57

The very next time Google indexed Belchfire.net after converting to static URLs, it indexed over 55000 pages that it did not index just 30 days before. These numbers are consistent both before and after moving to static URLs. Similar results from other search engines such as Inktomi, Alexa, and MSN.

Why is this so imporant?

Bottom line is simply this… The more pages and content on your web site that get indexed, the more likely it will be that one of your pages will come up in the search results when someone searches for keywords or phrased that appear on your pages, and ultimately the more visitors your site will receive.