Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses

It is important to have search engine friendly urls if you want your pages spidered and indexed by the search engines but what does having search engine friendly urls actually mean? Let’s take a look at what the three major search engines say about urls:

Google has three things to say on the subject in its Webmaster Guidelines:

1. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

2. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

3. Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

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Directory links can be a useful source of inbound links and a good way to obtain the initial 200+ links to your site but do not consider them a substitute for quality inbound links. Submission to SEO friendly general directories and niche directories (directories specialized by industry or geography) should be done carefully and methodically. (See update at end of post).
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A reciprocal link exists if website A links to website B and website B links to website A. There is more misinformation and obfuscation on reciprocal links than almost any other subject because mutually agreed link exchanges are falsely believed to be 100% effective in achieving high search engine rankings.

Whole businesses have been built around link exchanges and millions of site owners have bought into the myth. Lured by extravagant promises they have purchased automated link exchange software or indulged in organized link exchange schemes only to discover that their site never achieves their objectives and sometimes even gets banned by the search engines.
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Inbound links and their anchor text are the second most important factor in SEO after the title element. Certainly in terms of the time involved inbound links will be the area where most of your effort in SEO will be expended.

There are five main aspects to consider when obtaining inbound links:

• The anchor text
• The linking page (the page on which the link is situated)
• The linking site (the site which contains the page the link is on)
• The linked page (the page on your site that is linked to)
• Acquisition or link building (how to get them)

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Outbound links are links on your pages that reference pages on a site other than your own. Outbound links can have a positive or negative effect on your rankings depending on the site (page) you are linking to and also to some extent on how they are implemented on your site.

The main thing to remember is that outbound links are there for the benefit of users. They should normally be placed either inline with the text on a page (embedded) or on a separate ‘resource’ page that has been specially made for them. (The common term for these pages is “links page” but as 99.9% of links pages are of absolutely no use to the user or for SEO, to avoid confusion we shall call them ‘resource pages’).
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