SEO-friendly .htaccess

**freki** · 08-27-2007, 04:04 PM

I hear a lot of stuff about editing your .htaccess file to help your SEO, so my question at the pros is: what's yours look like? What are the basics to keep in mind?

**Learning Newbie** · 08-27-2007, 04:05 PM

Well you have to understand it's pretty low level stuff, mostly used to plug leaks. It depends on what holes need bandaids - you're not going to find a one-size-fits-all soclution.

**freki** · 08-27-2007, 04:12 PM

Oh I realize this...I'm just wondering about the very basics. Like one of my friends convinced me to always make the file redirect http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com or vice versa. Stuff like that....?

**Learning Newbie** · 08-27-2007, 04:47 PM

That's a great example of something that needs to happen, and hta is one of the tools available. Otherwise, some people are gonna click a link to www and some people will just type your domain in, then a few of both will link to you on their blog. They'll copy what's in the address bar for the link URL. By forcing everyone to one version or the other, you're not splitting your vote.

**trk247** · 08-29-2007, 02:42 PM

You want to rewrite your URL's to make them SEO friendly with htaccess.

So instead of a url looking like this:
http://www.somewhere.com/index.php?cat=2&page=12345

to a more SEO friendly URL like this:

http://www.somewhere.com/pages/cats/...your-life.html

Alot of applications like Wordpress, Joomla, and OsCommerce have contributions that are pretty to install.

This site discusses how to create your own:
http://sasha.goldnet.ca/archives/7-S...ndly-URLs.html

**zagu060807** · 08-29-2007, 03:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by freki

I hear a lot of stuff about editing your .htaccess file to help your SEO, so my question at the pros is: what's yours look like? What are the basics to keep in mind?

It may either redirect your inactive page to active page or enables you to have php in html

**chrishirst** · 08-29-2007, 07:37 PM

Quote:

I hear a lot of stuff about editing your .htaccess file to help your SEO,

I'd forget that idea straight away!
If your optimisation is poor or mediocre, no amount of fiddling with .htaccess is going to "help with SEO".

There are things that can be coded in .htaccess to work around potential technical problems certainly.

And "search engine friendly" URLs can cause more problems than the non existent one they are supposed to "fix".

**contact247** · 09-03-2007, 05:22 AM

I don't know about that. just try it if it works