URLs should be main focus of large site SEO
Friday, 23, Jan 2009 09:04
Businesses looking to make very large websites search engine-friendly may want to consider recent advice offered by the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Centre blog.
According to Jeremiah Andrick of Live Search, one of the main elements to consider when applying search engine optimisation (SEO) principles to large websites is how to control the number of URLs generated by the site in question.
Using canonicalisation, it is possible to make sure that each piece of website content has only one URL attached to it, he explained, advising SEO executives to remove references to index and default in web addresses and to delete the trailing / from the ends of URLs.
This will make it easier for search engine bots to crawl sites as they do not have to work through as many URLs.
Other tips offered by Mr Andrick included avoiding the use of CamelCase in URLs and removing any port numbers from them.
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts recently wrote in a Search Engine Land column that large website SEO should follow two steps: programmatic optimisation and manual content optimisation.