Question

This is my first post in stackoverflow. I want to improve its google pagerank on my sites and I just find out there are tens of things which are used to give pagerank to a webpage one of them is seo-friendly url.

My site is developed in php and I want to know how can I implement seo-friendly url and what changes I have to make in my .htaccess file regarding it. And also, is there any other good mechanism to improve pagerank.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Firstly, PageRank isn’t really considered useful by most people anymore – the value Google provides isn’t updated very often, and it’s considered to be an obsolete measurement.

The best way to get your site to show up highly on search engine results pages (SERPs) is to write high quality content which attracts links to it from other sites.

Having well structured markup (e.g. correct use of headers tags) will help.

As far as “SEO friendly URLs” go, having keywords in the URL is helpful (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=971qGsTPs8M). To do that, you need to read up on mod_rewrite. A sample rule might be:

RewriteRule ^/?([a-zA-Z-]+)/([a-zA-Z-]+)/([a-zA-Z-]+)$ display.php?country=$1&state=$2&city=$3 [L]  

This would allow you to visit say, http://www.example.com/USA/California/San-Diego, which would actually hit the script called display.php with the relevant parameters. the [L] tells apache that this is the last rule to follow.

One last tip as it sounds as if you are just getting into SEO – a lot of so called SEO advice is becoming more and more obselete as Google gets better and better – if an article is more than 2-3 years old, treat it with some suspicion.