Improving Your Clickthrough Rates With mod_rewrite

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Few would disagree with the assertion that the primary goal of organic search engine optimization is to attain the highest possible rankings for desirable key phrases in a given search engine. Most search engine marketing professionals also focus their attention on creating titles and descriptions that contain the targeted key phrases and are provocative in a way that effects click-throughs. Unfortunately, fewer devote any of their efforts to doing the same for URLs.

If one views a search engine result as real estate; and he or she views a high placement as something along the lines of owning a billboard at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, it soon becomes clear that ignoring the URL is tantamount to misappropriating 10-20% of your real estate. Users not only look at the title and description of a website, but also at the URL. Too often, we associate rewriting URLs on dynamic sites – that is, changing a URL from something like “products.php?category_id=1&product_id=2″ into “/Products/Electronics-1/Sony-32-Inch-Wega-2.html”, only with the goal of improving a site’s rankings. This may be true, as keywords in a URL may improve rankings a bit, and the removal of parameters may be especially helpful if a dynamic URL has many variables. But that is not the only benefit. The URL is one line in only a few lines of “real estate” that one receives when a high ranking is attained. A URL like “products.php?category_id=1&product_id=2″ will not encourage clicks, just as a boring, non-informative title or description will not facilitate click-throughs.

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