h3. Best Practice
bq. Use human readable URLs
h3. Rationale
This is human readable:
http://www.bestbuy.com/electronics/research
This is not:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=cat12074&type=page&categoryRep=cat03000
The problem with complex URLs is three-fold:
# A human cannot “reverse engineer” a URL to figure out where they are in the site or what might be “one level higher”. Human readable URLs allow you to “cut off” the end of the URL and get to a higher level in the site. URLs that reflect the site’s page layout also act as a secondary way-finding tool.
# It is hard to share URLs that are not human readable. If you cut and paste a complex URL into an e-mail to share it, often the URL will break in two because it is too long to fit on one line. This creates a broken link for the recipient.
# Some search engines have a hard time with overly complex URLs and you may find that many of your pages are not accessible to search engine “bots” looking for your content.
Category: SEO
We all know that anything to do with search is hot these days.
And now the smart companies are starting to take a closer look at the search engines on their own sites.
Whether you call this “site search” or “internal search” or ‘who-knows-what’ search, I predict this area is going to see a lot of excitement and evolution in the next few years.
I recently completed a fascinating site search consulting project for a large media company. Since they publish a number of magazines, they have a vast content archive and a vested interest in making it as easy as possible for Website visitors to be able to get to their content as efficiently as possible.
My company was hired to help the media company understand how to improve their site search. During the course of the project, my colleagues and I developed an unofficial list of what we started to refer to as “Site Search Best Practices.” These best practices are independent of any one particular site search system (i.e., the technology solution) and will be of benefit to any company, large or small, that is implementing site search.
So, without much further ado, here are some of our Site Search Best Practices:
_This article is by Guest Contributor Marc Poirer._
According to “PEW’s recent survey of Internet usage”:http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_SearchData_1105.pdf (links to PDF), search is now the second most popular Internet activity, edging towards email as the primary Internet application.
Search usage jumped dramatically from 30% of American Internet users in June 2004 to 41% in September of 2005.