Website Rewrite for Search Engine Optimisation

09:43.23 - Sunday 30th September 2007   (Link to This Entry)

No, not this one. I've spent the weekend rewriting a jewellery website to make it ridiculously Search Engine friendly using mod_rewrite and anything else I can think of. It all came about when I asked a client of mine how she was doing with her Google Adwords and it transpired the site needed an overhaul - so away I went.

Since I've been practising SEO on this site and sharing info with K on the subject, it was fairly easy to start from scratch and put together the product category and viewing structure that was required. Every page in the category section has URLs that are rewritten from:

http://domain/Retail/Silver_Necklaces/Silver/Pearl/

to

http://domain/products.php?a=Necklaces&b=Silver&c=Pearl

This means the Search Engines see the former, but my script is the latter and much, much easier to work with. Best of both worlds? Yes, but it requires a lot of though into how to structure your RewriteRules and even what order to place them in.

OK, so the page URLs can be fancy schmancy keyword-laden affairs, but you have to generate them as well, so a local version of Apache is essential because you don't want to be configuring and restarting it on a live server in the hope that you got it right first time. It doesn't help that I have no real clue how Regular Expressions work, either - most of mine are copy/paste.

And it's Sunday - what the hell?