H Guys,

 

 

I had a designer build a database driven site for me. The idea was to search for a type of business in location. Say for example my site was about beauty salons. They would type the location or postcode in the search function and it would list the beauty salons.

 

I have been told my site is not SEO friendly cuz the http tag is :

 

 

i.e. searching for something beauty salon in Telford yields

 

 

 

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/search.php?q=tel...amp;x=0&y=0

 

Instead of

 

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/beautysalons/telford

 

 

Is this something that could be corrected or is it possible still to have a seo using the former. I feel that my designer was not completely honest when he said he would make the site seo enhanced.

 

 

Thanks

Having "pretty urls" like http://www.mydomain.co.uk/beautysalons/telford will definitely have more SEO benefit than using query strings.

 

You don't necessarily need to rewrite your script, though. You should just be able to modify your .htaccess file (if you're using Apache) using mod_rewrite to silently redirect the "pretty urls" to the query string version — and the user would only see the pretty version in the address bar.

 

You can find an example of this technique at this Dev Shed article.

SEO is often a separate service to web design, but if your developer said they'd do it it certainly doesn't sound like they did everything they could.

 

Nice URLs and optimised META tags (which is I think what you meant by your http tag) are things that can be easily achieved without doing a major overhaul of your site. If search engine rankings is really something you care about, I'd suggest you employed a specialist. There are a few around here

Ok first you need to consider WHERE you want pretty url's

 

It doesnt matter if a search url renders as yoursite.com/search?location=bath&price=over2kunder10k

 

Because you don't want a search engine to index your search results pages. Results pages are dynamic, do not contain search engine worthy content, and should not be targetted towards search engines at all.

 

What you want to worry about is the url's of the individual business pages, so for example

 

you search for beauty salons telford

url = http://yoursite.com/search?location=telford&price=hairy

 

you get a page of search results listing beauty salons in telford, you click on one, NOW you want the pretty url

http://yoursite.com/telford/beauty-salon-1.htm

 

I would also arrange your nagivation by categories with rewritten url's so that users and search engines can browse to urls like

 

yoursite.com/telford-music.htm

yoursite.com/telford-shopping.htm

yoursite.com/telford-clubbing.htm