Friends today we will discuss about URL rewriting and its importance in SEO and digital marketing world. First of all we will let you know what is URL rewriting and why it is so important.
What is URL rewriting (File Renaming) and why it is necessary
URL rewriting is a SEO technique which is used to optimize website in search engine rankings. As we all know there tow types of websites exist in today’s world, one is static website or simple html websites and dynamic websites. URL rewriting is required in dynamic websites where webpages are generated dynamically.
The webpages URLs are not recognized by humans as it use dynamic values example – http://example.com/product.php?id=4&subid=16. In this example you can not identify what is this page about, similarly search engine crawlers can’t identify the page content and theme according to its URL.
So URL rewriting application/program located in a web application framework running on a web server that modifies a web URL’s name, so that people and search engine can recognize page content according to page URL.
URL rewriting guidelines
URL rewriting is one of the most important SEO activities as we have told you in earlier blogs. Here are few URL rewriting guidelines which you can ask your developer or web-master to follow.
1. URLs/ file names of web pages should be in human readable form example – http://example.com/clothing/shirts.aspx
2. Do not use too many directory slash (/) in URLs
3. Do not use special characters in URLs (Your web developer or webmaster should add exception for special characters)
4. Do not use underscores (_) in URLs.
5. Use Hyphen (-) as separater between two words example – http://example.com/clothing/shirts/formal-shirts.aspx
URL rewriting in different web applications
There are different ways of URL rewriting implementation in different web applications and CMSs
1. PHP based websites use .htaccess file
2. .Net ASPX websites use web.config file
3. Java based websites use servlet and web.xml
Most of the CMSs now days using inbuilt URL rewriting. Most of the time it is enabled by default and sometimes you need to configure it.
There are some other technical SEO implementation which you can read in our previous blogs.