5 big reasons why your web addresses should be Friendly URLs

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Good search engines like Google love well constructed URLs. The keywords between each slash ("/") are used to give the search engine clues on what the content on the page is about.

Not only should you have your most important key words in your primary domain, but each part of the URL should describe what is on the page, usually in one or two words.  Spaces can help, but in URLs you can only use an underscore.

Consider these addresses.  Now in the first example, noone searching for this page would use the words "Content", "Topic" or "849".  The question mark doesn't just mystify you and I, many search engines actually ignore everything  past the "?" symbol, meaning that, although the homepage might appear in search results, the parks and gardens page may not be indexed or returned in a search at all !

In contrast, people searching for "parks and gardens in Boroondara" are much more likely to find this page as all of the keywords are represented in the URL. 
But don't take my word for it, try it yourself.

• Google search for "parks and gardens in banyule"
• Google search for "parks and gardens in boroondara"

2. Marketing and Brochures

Although Google friendliness can save you a lot in web advertising, you'll still need to other ways to advertise information to people.

Consider that you want to put the address to a web page with more information on a product or service in one of your brochures.  You might want to put it into a letter as part of a direct marketing campaign. What if you want to read it out to someone over the phone ?

Which of the two addresses above would be easier to for people to remember or type in to their web browser ?

Of course, it is the one that contains words that mean something to you and I.  That is, it is imperative that addresses to pages that you want to advertise this way are human friendly, as short and easy to understand as possible to make it as easy as possible for people to type into their browser. 

People have been doing it for years with telephones, 1300 DATALINK is much easier to punch into the dial than 613 9521 4400.  The same applies to the web.

Even better, you should be able to create an alias for the page, such as www.boroondara.vic.gov.au/parks just for this purpose.

3. Usability

One of the best things about friendly URLs is that it can tell users about the structure of the site and the context of the current page.  Web developers often described this as a "semantic" URLs.  

Each word between the slashes tends to tell a little story about the page.  You can go up a page in the site heirarchy just by removing a bit of the address.  It is just like a mini breadcrumb trail.

In a good site with a good information archiecture, you can almost guess what the address of the pages are.

And with unfriendly URLs, bookmarking pages will not always give you the expected results.

4. Web Reports and Statistics

You probably check your website statistics from time to time to see how your site is performing.

One of the most popular reports for webmasters is the Top 10 or most popular pages on your site.

If you want to generate such a report and you have unfriendly URLs then this will cause a real problem as you won't be able to see what the pages are without clicking on the links.  This effectively makes the report itself meaningless, and not at all easy to print out and explain to your CEO.

You may not think that this is a big deal but trust me, this will drive your webmaster or marketing manager nuts ....

5. Technical and Security

Another thing that every IT department should know is that any slightly technically savvy person can tell just by looking at the first URL that the site is running Microsoft ASP.NET on a Windows server and assume that it is also running Microsoft SQL Server.  With a little bit of playing around with the numbers and letters after the "?" symbol, they could do something called a SQL injection.  This basically means that a determine hacker could possibly, by knowing a bit about the technology, deface the site, delete a database or worse still - compromise your internal systems.

But even if your IT is 100% sure that the site is secure, do we really care that TopicId=849 ?  Do we really need to know any of this technical stuff ?  It looks complex and impressive, but does it really add anything to the user experience ?

With Friendly URLs, we can hide the underlying technology from the user, and helping to make the site more secure at the same time.

Conclusion

Now using Friendly URLs with a static HTML website is fairly easy, but most websites have some sort of content management system (CMS) to help manage the content.

The trouble is, most of these systems have no support for friendly URLs.  This is because is actually quite difficult to program. 

As simple as they might seem, they don't just happen magically.  Not to throw you with the technology, but to do friendly URLs properly and do any URL Re-writing, you will require server extensions such as mod rewrite in Linux/Apache and ISAPI modules in Windows/Internet Information Service (IIS) and complex things called rewrite rules and regular expressions which are like Egyptian hieroglyphs to even the most experienced in web developers.  Suffice to say that they are way beyond most novices and web designers.

Making is simple, our content management system, Freestyler, has FriendlyURLs support built-in, and does it automatically every time you create a page.  This enables web page authors to give every page a unique and easy-to-remember website address, which is jargon free and easy to remember.  It also allows you to create compressed, easy to type alias addresses (such as www.datalink.com.au/freestyler) for important marketing campaigns.

It doesn't really matter what technology our customers use because Freestyler has friendly URL support for both Windows and Linux servers and our hosting is set up to utilise the technology.

As a result, many of the websites on our portfolio rank perform really well with Google and take many of the headaches away from webmasters and marketing managers who care nothing for the underlying technology.

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