With a flutter of requests from customers to support Search Engine (SE) friendly URLS, the recent update to Plum CMS took this into consideration, making all the menus within Plum CMS dynamically generate SEO friendly URLs. As a company that can trace its web and software development roots to 1997, we have closely followed the evolution of the web from a communication tool to a marketing tool to what it has become today (hard to sum it up in one word!).

 

But, really, our customers demanded that Plum CMS generate SE friendly URLs. On many custom projects and tools that we develop for clients, several of them have asked for easily read URLs to be made part of the software, and yet others seem to think that having easy to read URLs will really make their website more friendly. Put simply, what you have heard is true - to some extent. A URL , website or webpage address does carry a lot of weight for a multitude of reasons, although from a Search Engine perspective, it doesn’t necessarily carry a lot of weight. It simply makes your page or site more relevant.

 

Here is how:

 

Would you rather visit http://www.vafta.com/index.php?page=9 or http://www.vafta.com/about-vafta-solutions_9. Whatever your personal choice, Google has made its choice clear. The blokes over at Google say that about-vafta-solutions_9 tells them a lot more about what’s on the page than index.php?=9 does. I’m sure that makes more sense to you too. What this essentially means is that the URL may make a page more relevant for a specific search on a search engine, thereby increasing your chances of being ranked and listed higher than, say, your competition.

 

Let’s illustrate with an example: Say one of the things you sell on your website is Xerox printers. Now, if you use one of the many eCommerce packages on the market that focus primarily on the technology side of things and not on the SEO aspect, your URL for the page that lists all the Xerox printers probably looks like http://www.mysite.com/categories.php?=12 where 12 is the category code for all Xerox products. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your competitor’s site does use SE friendly URLs. In that case, their URL may look like http://www.mycompetitor.com/xerox-printers.

 

Think like Google, Bing or Yahoo. If someone comes to your search engine and searches for Xerox printers, unless the content on your competitor’s page is totally irrelevant or absurd, your competitor has a far better chance of convincing the search engine that their page is MORE RELEVANT to the search than your page. In essence, that’s all a search engine friendly URL does (for smaller websites and businesses anyway). Now, if you own or run a website or blog with 10,000+ pages and you have 200 different categories, such friendly URLs could be of great help to your visitors too.