United States
Friendly URLs
October 23, 2007 by Jean
An important change was introduced to UGAL last week, as we switched from system generated URLs to friendly URLs. For example, this page is available at:
Keep reading to see why friendly URLs are good for people and even better for search engines.
Good for People
Friendly URLs speak much more to your visitors than system generated URL, which is always good when you communicate the address of a page of your website with someone.
Even better for Search Engines
They have another huge advantage: search engines love them.
Imagine that you are a spider sent by Google to visit a website. If you are sent to http://www.domain.com/index.aspx?p=news&id=152555, you have no clue about the content of the page. However, if you are sent to http://www.domain.com/news/we-have-a-new-website you already know what the page is about.
Giving as many hints as possible to search engines about the content of your web pages is very important in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Because spiders are not that smart to start with, it helps a lot to feed them with easy to digest information as early as possible.
We have been making a number of other small changes to optimize how search engines understand content that is published with UGAL. Most of them are behind the scenes changes (when you view the source of a web page), and added together they will help improve how search engines understand your website.
How does it work
Friendly URLs are available now for all the pages published with UGAL (news, products, portfolios, calendar of events and FAQs). When you create or edit a page, there is a new URL field where you can either type the friendly URL of your choice or have one suggested based on the title of the page:
Notes:
- Pages that where created before the feature was introduced do not have a friendly URL. You can add one at any time (or change the existing one) by editing the page.
- Pages can be accessed using either URL: friendly (/news/friendly-urls) or system generated (/news/2477).