You've implemented keyword research, H1 tags, unique content and a myriad of other SEO techniques to rank your site higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but what about SEO friendly URLs? Search engines as well as human visitors love them and they most certainly help your search engine friendly ecommerce efforts, but what exactly are they and how can you implement them?

We all know a URL is simply the string of characters that make up a website address (URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator). From an SEO perspective URLs were not particularly relevant when the Internet got started, but as time has gone on, URL readability has become a big issue.

To illustrate the issue of URL readability, which of the following URLs would you rather have on your own search engine friendly ecommerce site?

www.mysite/livingroom/lamps.htm

Or

www.mysite.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=40&products_id=6

The answer is obvious from a human perspective, but it's not only humans who prefer readable URLs, it turns out search engines prefer them as well. Google, Bing and Yahoo all prefer a readable URL because it helps the human searcher better understand search engine results. This preference is one more factor that can help your site rank even better and it can improve your Click-Thru Rate (CTR) as well, since it is easier to figure out the probable content of a page from a readable URL.

One other plus of an SEO friendly URL is keyword insertion. Your SEO efforts will go that much further if your page content also happens to have the keyword in the page title and in the URL. The question then becomes, why doesn't every ecommerce site use SEO friendly URLs? The answer lies in your shopping cart platform.

A URL such as the first one in the example above is considered a static URL and is the result of a page being created and stored on a server. Unfortunately not too many e-commerce platforms today rely on this system since it has several inherent disadvantages. Instead, most e-commerce platforms today use dynamic URLs which are the type we consider unreadable.

While most SEO efforts simply require content re-write, SEO friendly URLs require support from your e-commerce platform. Either you have it, or you don't. If your platform doesn't support them, you're out of luck or you need to switch e-commerce platforms.

Our award winning AbleCommerce shopping cart solutions are not only powerful but they are easy to use as well. They also provide you with a huge list of options, one of which is implementation of SEO friendly URLs. Feel free to contact us and we'll be happy to provide you with a free 30 day trial so you can see the benefits for yourself.