Search Engine Friendly URLs

What are SEF URLs:- Search Engine Friendly URLs commonly abbreviated as SEF URLs.URL is top most beginning element of any website & this should be selected carefully if you are looking to promote your website on major search engines.

Search engines always tend to give preference to those things that most commonly liked by human users. So while selecting your url do take into consideration few things:

Your domain name should be Human friendly enough like: should not be too long, easy to remember, should be theme specific.

If the name that you have chosen is available in .com then don't go for any other TLD (.biz,.info so on..)as .com is most popular and people do like them.

Take care of canonical issues carefully:

http://www.domainname.com
http://domainname.com
http://domainname.com/index.html
http://www.domainname.com/index.html


All these domain above listed may seem to be quite similar to each other to a normal Human visitor, but these are entirely different from each other from Search Engines view.

So fix all these issues at time of Hosting..Else follow Search Engine Friendly Redirect methods to solve canonical issues.

Most preferred domain name is : http://www.domainname.com
so for the rest of the possibilities just implement Search Engine Friendly Permanent Redirect 301.

Don't go for Dynamic URLs: Search engines like Static URL mostly because they find them easy to crawl and navigate as compared to dynamic urls. even if your website consist of Dynamic URLs like : contains Query strings(?, =, *, %, &) all these are difficult to crawl than simply static urls.

Try to embed your Targeted keyword in your Domain name: this is most commonly asked question that whether main keyword in URL name helps in rankings or not.

Answer is quite simple Doesn't matter.
As advanced major SE like Google consider rankings based on hundreds of factors and this can be very last or have minute effect that keyword in URL will help..But in some other search engines like MSN this Keyword in URL still has some importance but not in GOOGLE.

Underscore OR Dashes: this can be other possibility while designing your URLs .
See Google consider all these special characters very differently.According to me dashes are much more beneficial as compare to Underscores as far as GOOGLE is considered.

Lets Do It Yourself:
Go to Google:
enter: worldwide-seo see the no. of results and analyze them carefully. Now
Enter: worldwide_seo see the no. of results and analyze them carefully.

If you Do it carefully then you will see that in former query Google has returned more results as compared to Later. This is because Google has returned all the results that were matching : worldwide, seo, worldwide seo, worldwideseo

But in later only results containing specific results for worldwide_seo has been returned.
So why to loose your traffic for the rest of possible combination s by replacing dashes with underscores. Go for Dashes rather than Underscores.



Thanks
SEO & Internet Marketing Specialist