Today I spoke with a friend about search engine friendly URLs and how they are important for SEO in regards to your site indexing and ranking well in the search engines.  Many content management systems and other hosting platforms don’t offer SEF URLs as a standard feature of the system.  It’s very worth your time to find a plug-in or module you can install to help you accomplish this task.  Some will allow you to automate the process of naming your pages and other require a bit more work, but either way it’s one of the first things you’ll want to do to your site if it’s not already set up.   This is the case with many popular content management systems such as Joomla.

Why are SEF URLs important?

Search engines prefer static URLs as compared to dynamic URL’s.  Static URLs are simply easier for engines to crawl and a static URL is completely read by the engine.  A dynamic URL would often appear like something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?pageid&=123456w&1212121212%search

or

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?pageid&=123456w&3434343434%search

You get the idea.  When an engine reads that domain they are going to stop at the ? on every page on your site meaning they are reading every page as http://www.yoursite.com/index.php.  That is not a good thing because these URLs appears as duplicate URLs to the engines.  You want the engines to read your URLs as separate pages that are unique.  Engines much rather prefer a static domains structure such as the examples below:

http://www.yoursite.com/about-us.php

or

http://www.yoursite.com/seo-tools-and-resources.php

I hope this helps you better grasp the concept and importance of SEF URLs.

A few days ago I had a so called “consultant” say to me…I’m not really sure what I should tell people when they ask me what kind of info I should be telling my clients to include in their title and meta data. This person has been in this industry for over 5 years now, I was shocked. This probably comes from the fact that this person learned the correct answer to that questions 5 years ago, and hasn’t stayed up to date on it. So, here is my answer…if you have the same questions, I hope this helps.

Title

Your title is the most important element of your page. You must include it and optimize it if you want to have a chance at ranking for the important keywords you are targeting for that given page. Your title should be about 3-5 keywords in length and can be limited to that only as there is no need to waste that valuable space with anything else. If you were targeting the financial budgeting arena on your page here is a sample of what your title might be:

Financial Budgeting Software | Home Budget Software | Home Finance Software | Personal Finance

That would be it. Don’t load it up with anything other than the words you are targeting and be specific.

Meta Description

Your meta description is still important to a point because many engines still use it to serve as your description in their engine. Therefore, you want to fill it out with regards to your targeted keywords for that page. It should be around 25-30 words in length. Another financially related example:

At “domain.com” we believe that home budget software and home finance software is vital to your personal finance success. Use our financial budgeting software to stay on track for retirement.

Meta Keywords

This section is the least important by far of these sections. Some will say, don’t bother filling it out, but I teach that you want to fill it out in the right way or it will hurt you a bit. Limit this section only to the keywords you are targeting for that page and keep it simple. Don’t fall victim to your desire to load this section up. Example for the page we have been using as an example:

financial budgeting software, home budget software, home finance software, personal finance

That is it. Don’t load it up anymore for this given page and you’ve done it right.

Conclusion

I hope this helps provide you with some concrete examples and guides to assist you with writing your page title and meta data.