Does your web shop have a problem with page names?

Fixing page names is essential if you want lots of visitors

Have you noticed your page names look something like this:
"/showgood.php?category=34&good=146"?
If so, then you do have a problem.

The problem is that search engines cannot decipher all those question marks, equals signs and ampersands. As a result they ignore everything after ".php". This can mean that although your site might have thousands of pages google and yahoo can only see two or three of them. If this is the case you will probably get very little web traffic.

Another example of less than perfect page naming is more subtle in appearance and effect. Google-friendly URLs (URL is the official term for a page name. It stands for 'Uniform Resource Locator') are names that Google and others can read and also decypher some meaning from. Hence a URL that ends 'sailingboats.html' for example is not as good as one called 'sailing-boats.html'. This is because Google expects hyphens to seperate words. So, now, before Google has even looked at your page they know that it is likely to be about sailing and boats.

The solution to poor page names

Most pages of the sort we are discussing are created by 'content management systems'. A Content Management System (CMS) is a tool for non-technical staff to create and update web content. Typically the words, pictures, prices etc you enter in your website's admin section are stored on a database and then the Content management System creates the pages on-the-fly as and when someone visits your website.

So, you need a CMS but you need it to produce sensible urls like "/jewellery/diamond.html" rather than "/showgood.php?category=34&good=146". You need sensible URLs because both humans and computers can see and understand something about the pages you really have and what their content is all about.

The actual task of rewriting bad page URLS into sensible names automatically (you wouldn't want to do it manually) is a little bit complex so if you don't know one end of a htaccess file from the other why not call Brown Bear Media and let us help you make your online shop work harder for you.

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