Maximize My Website

SEF URLs are URLs for your website's content generated using keywords in order to improve the visibility of  your site to a search engine.

An example of this might be:

www.example.com/my-article-title-or-keywords.html

The best way to explain why they matter is to go back to reason why they are used.

Original websites were created using just HTML files. So the above type of URL would exist naturally as users would save their HTML files with words that described their content. The developers of search engines noticed this pattern and began using URLs and filenames as hints as to the contents of web pages.

However, as websites grew and managing thousands of plain HTML files became a nightmare, website owners turned to new web technologies. They replaced the flat HTML files with databases. This meant all they needed were a few HTML files that defined the layout, and their content would be inserted into place. However, to determine which piece of content to show on each page they would need to assign a unique id number for the database. They theremore ended up with URLs that looked like:

www.example.com/article.php?id=34245&page=1

or

www.example.com/article.php?key=my-article-title

The search engines could no longer use this as a hint for the contents of the document. As the filename is only the parts to the left of the question mark, they also couldn't tell which parts of the URL were significant or which were not. In comes SEF URLs.

Server applications like mod_rewrite for the Apache Web Server and ISAPI_Rewrite for Microsoft's IIS Web Server allow website owners to mimic the older URLs. They do so using a set of "rules". They take the incoming URL interpret it and run certain rules to determine which file to execute. In this way we can create a url like:

www.example.com/my-article-title.html

The rewrite rules would interpret that URL and "rewrite" it to:

www.example.com/article.php?urlKey=my-article-title

This gives the win-win situation. Search engines will only ever see the existing URL, while a web application can use a database to quickly and efficiently store and retrieve content on the website.