Nothing is worse than having to build around a messy site. What I mean by messy is lengthy URLS with pointless characters and crazy dynamic URLs! So here are my tips on creating an SEO-friendly site:

1) Use static URLs when possible. This might not be possible with really large sites, but if your site has less than 50 pages and doesn’t require new pages to be created all the time, this is definitely the way to go. This is definitely the easiest way and best for SEO. The second best is using an htaccess redirect to use a name in the URL and pass it as a GET variable. Something like this:

http://www.tampacreations.com/portfolio

In this case, portfolio is being passed as a GET variable, and you should always check this against an array of acceptable values! Combine that htaccess code with the proper rewrite condition to tack on the www, and handle forward slashes at the end too. Would you like to see it? Here’s the code I’m using:

Options -Indexes
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

So that’s the second best option if you have to go with dynamic URLs and it works pretty well! I believe I’m using PHP, then, to set 404 status of not found domains.

2) Search Pages can be a nightmare! Search pages can be problematic because they’re dynamic by nature and can end up having lots of variables in them. I think the trick here is to have a few of them indexed (the simple ones) and list those in your sitemap. The other ones you can let Google figure out or just deny it access.

3) Watch out for capitalization! Capitalization counts in URLs (just not the domain), so if I were to have a page Portfolio.html and portfolio.html, those are two different pages! If you’re using dynamic URLs, this can become a big problem with duplicate content.

4) Multiple websites. Lot of e-commerce site owners have the mentality that duplicating their entire store 5 times and putting it on 5 different domains helps their SEO out. Probably not a good idea. What ends up happening is since most stores have a lot of products, the owners use the same descriptions, same images, everything, and all the sites end up having duplicated content issues! I happy to report that a client I worked with who had this issue across 4 domains, downsized to one domain, and has twice as much traffic now after doing so in about 12 months. It takes time, but it’s worth it. The only way you should keep 5 different stores is if all the stores are different! Different product titles, different descriptions for each page, keywords, product descriptions, shipping text, contact text, etc. etc. etc. Everything should be completely different if you want to rank well.