I've read a great deal of discussion recently (both on this site and elsewhere) about "friendly URLs" but I'm not sure what exactly makes a URL "friendly" and why we really even care (up to a certain point). Illustration:
The following is an example of a URL that would be held up by the majority of current web developers as "friendly":
www.myblog.com/posts/123/this-is-the-name-of-my-blog-post
Whereas this would be considered "unfriendly" (i.e. bad, Neanderthal, ignorant, stupid):
www.myblog.com/posts.aspx?id=123
My questions:
<title>
tag and content are for?I said earlier "up to a point" because obviously, URLs can get out of hand. Here is an actual URL from Amazon.com that I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider "friendly":
http://www.amazon.com/Bissell-Kitchen-Housewares/b/ref=amb_link_5001972_17?ie=UTF8&node=694500&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gp-center-5&pf_rd_r=1ZXNJFE0CCFFDH4B9HGH&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=405478901&pf_rd_i=510080
Keeping URLs as simple, relevant, compelling, and accurate as possible is key to getting both your users and search engines to understand them (a prerequisite to ranking well). Although URLs can include ID numbers and codes, the best practice is to use words that people can comprehend.
What are SEO friendly URLs? SEO friendly URLs are URLs that are designed to meet the needs of users and searchers. Specifically, URLs optimized for SEO tend to be short and keyword-rich.
See if your website's URLs and internal links are SEO friendly. The best way to work with it is to mark clearly the names and make sure there are no spaces, underscores or other unnecessary characters.
Tim Berners-Lee (the architect of the WWW) wrote a great article about this subject about 10 years ago.
Your example is a bad URL -- but not just because it has both an id and a "slug" (the abbreviated, hyphenated form of the page title). Putting the page title into your URL is problematic in the long term. Content will change over time. If you ever change the title of that blog post, you'll be forced to choose between keeping the old URL, or changing the URL to match the new title. Changing the URL will break any previous links to that page; and not changing it means you'll have a URL that doesn't match the page. Neither is good for the user. Better to just go with www.myblog.com/posts/123.
Users often do need to type a URL, but more importantly, sometimes they'll also edit existing URLs to find other pages in your site. Thus, it's often good to have discoverable URLs. For example, if I want to see post #124, I could easily look at the current URL and figure that the URL for the page I want to see is www.myblog.com/posts/124. That's a level of user-friendliness that can be a big help to people trying to find what they're looking for. Including other information (like the subject of the post) can make this impossible -- so it reduces my exploration options.
Forget about SEO. Search engine technology has been reducing the effectiveness of SEO hacks for some time. Good content is still king -- and in the long run, you won't be able to game the system.
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