We just hosted a webinar with some friends of ours at Dinkum Interactive about search engine optimization. It was great and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback so far.
One of the biggest lessons we addressed during the presentation was the importance of looking beyond just the technology and just the marketing when it comes to coaxing people to find you on the Internet. It’s much more than having the right tools or writing the right copy. So-called search engine optimization is a full-on effort that ensures that you’re always promoting your company and making sure that people are always learning about you.
But there are a few things you can do to help coax search engines to move you up their web pages. One is clean URLs.
Every page on your website has its own address, or URL. Search engines, as do people, like to see these addresses when they make sense. So they’ll avoid cataloging those pages with such addresses as
http://www.talance.com/aspweb/ur123/do/results?firsttime=y&
set=search&referer=&edition=&sortResultsBy=TopicRelevance
=9644205E04CF9DBF1B850C0219204572_1188832070933&
urn=urn%3Abigchalk%3AUS%3BBCLib%3Bdocument%3B112707510
And prefer addresses that give a clear indication of the information on the page, such as:
This can be done automatically if your CMS (content management system) has clean URLs installed. Then it will read the page’s title and make that the URL, rather than a mechanical string.
Try it out, and see if suddenly more people are able to find you online.