Most webmasters and search engine optimization company experts spend endless hours struggling to come up with the best domain names for their clients’ website. They try to think of a domain name that is relevant and appropriate, business and professional-sounding, unique, easy to spell and remember, looks perfect on a business card and is available as a dot-com.
Most of the time, the availability of the “thought of” domain name becomes the main problem. In most cases, someone else had already registered the domain name that you want. Forward-thinking web companies have made the registration with the prospect of selling that “needed” domain name at a premium price. And left without a choice, the registered domain name is bought by the SEO Company, spending unnecessarily, thousands of dollars for the domain name alone.
Unfortunately, it is not only the domain name that matters. The URL – the element after the domain name, is equally important to be appropriate, relevant, professional, easy to remember and spell, and highly readable. Both the domain name and the URLs attract customers to the site and improve search ranking.
Good thing there is a technique called URL rewriting that can convert unsightly and confusingly vague URLs into more appropriate and fitting ones , without agonizing about the complex alpha numeric combinations which if seen by anyone does not seem to have any meaning whatsoever. URL rewriting enables you to fill out your URLs with friendly, readable keywords without affecting the underlying structure of your pages.
Aside from eliminating the confusing alphanumeric combinations on the URLs, URL rewriting is one of the best and most immediate ways to improve the usability and user-friendliness of your site.
URL rewriting allows you to completely isolate or separate the URL from the resource. An example for a banking website would be: http://www.mybanksite.com/aboutus.html instead of the vague URL http://www.mybanksite.com/page1.html. The first URL has more definitive description of what the page contains, while the latter URL vaguely describes the page content as page1. While the latter URL is easy to spell and read, it does not tell the search engine what page 1 contains.
Working with URL Rewriting
- Platforms and Tools. Check the software running your server. Chances are you may have access to URL rewriting modules. If not, you can politely request your host to enable the feature or install the relevant modules for URL rewriting. One of the easiest systems to get URL rewriting running is Apache. It usually comes with its own built-in URL rewriting module, mod_rewrite, enabled. Working with mod_rewrite is as easy and simple as uploading formatted and named text files. Most Apache hosting accounts include Apache’s mod_rewrite as a standard inclusion. So if you’re on shared hosting, you are unlikely to have to do anything. If you’re managing your own box, then you most likely just have to turn on mod_rewrite.
- Friendly URLs. In writing URLs, you should separate word with hyphens and not with underscores and capitalize consistently, although lowercase letters are usually preferred. Dots, commas and other punctuation should also be written as hyphens. Apostrophes and parentheses are also recommended to be excluded so as not to make the URL ugly and confusing.
- Old and New URL. When a URL-rewritten page is renamed, both the old and new URL should still work. But to avoid duplicate content penalty, the old URL should automatically redirect to the new URL. For all re-written pages with new URLs, make sure you update and resubmit your site map, product feeds and other places they appear or display.
URL rewriting creates an impression especially if it’s well written, meaning it really speaks of a certain page. Just don’t forget to update your sitemap so your newly written URL will be indexed by search engines.
An expert web design company would actually suggest that URL’s upon a websites’ launch must be final and well written. Although, some circumstances cannot be prohibited that lead to URL rewriting.
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