Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs have been a hot topic in search engine marketing for the past five years or so.

What is SEF?
A search engine friendly url is a url that has been rewritten so that special characters (#, %,&, ?, etc.) are removed.

Example, Bad URL: http://www.gregbabnigdesign.com/marketing?_public%relations/

Example, SEF URL: http://www.gregbanigdesign.com/marketing-public-relations/

Why SEF?
Most search engines, and search engine spiders, take issues with special characters. And by, “take issue” I mean they don’t read these characters, or the url. If search engines can not read a url, they can not index a url, if they can’t index a url it doesn’t show up in search results. See the problem.

More likely you are developing using a database driven language or with a content management system.

Implementing SEF
If you are building a static site (no dynamic pages) then this is pretty simple. In a static site you just need to make sure you save all pages, includes, and folders/directories in a SEF format.

More likely you are developing a dynamic, database driven website or you’re using a content management system to develop your site. This is where you’ll run into the most issues with SEF urls.

The Joomla content management system comes with a built-in utility for rewriting URLS into a SEF format. There are also numerous, more advanced third party options available as a free extension. The major downside with the Joomla SEF components is that they are pretty much built for an Apache/Unix server setup and are not very Windows friendly.

In fact, most off-the-shelf SEF rewriting tools are not geared towards a Windows hosting environment.

If you are working in Joomla, my favorite SEF component would be shSEF404 (view site). This comes with a lot of tools beyond mere SEF rewriting, including the ability to manage meta data and page titles. Basically an all encompassing SEF tool in one.

If you are not working in Joomla there are too many options to list for creating SEF urls.

While planning your approach keep in mind that the process is fairly simple as long as you can:

1) Write a script to locate special characters in URLs and to replace these

2) Configure your server to recognize the new URLs and serve those pages to visitors.

If you completely avoid SEF urls your problems may only be short term. Articles suggest that Google is able to read and recognize special characters in urls. If other major search engines haven’t followed suit, expect them to shorty.

But, if you want guarantee that your pages can be read and indexed by search engines a SEF strategy is essential.

==========================
Article by Greg Banig Design & Marketing, http://www.gregbanigdesign.com