How URL Rewriting Impacts Your e-Commerce Webshop

The technology regarding SEO (search engine optimization) is always evolving, but the fundamentals stay the same. It’s all about being found by the right customers. Without SEO, your website won’t be indexed by search spiders and you won’t rank highly (or at all) in search engine result pages. However, there is no “one and done” tactic or quick fix; we must consistently optimize multiple areas of our website. This includes clear site structure, use of keywords, and relevant content. URL rewriting is one of the tactics that we can use to improve the visibility of your website to search engines.

URL slugs are the part of the URL that undergoes rewriting. It’s the dynamic portion that describes the content of the specific web page. This is the part that needs to be search engine and user-friendly.

Search Engine Friendly

Getting your site indexed is the whole point of SEO. This helps you rank higher on search engine result pages, putting you in front of the right customers, and thus, improving your conversion rate. So what makes a URL friendly? Instead of product ID numbers and being too long and confusing, they should be short and easily understandable. Long query strings are not user-friendly as it isn’t immediately obvious to the user what the contents of the web page are. With poorly structured URL’s, search engines can miss the important keywords and rank you poorly as a result.

For your Customers

Clean and friendly URL’s are more likely to be clicked by customers. Customers may be more likely to click on the link if they can see it contains the keyword they want. Shorter URL also makes it easy for them to type, share, and remember. The user experience will be more intuitive, something search engines recognize as positive and will rank your page accordingly.

Managed in Nav-to-Net

In e-Commerce, you may have an extensive product catalog, that will mean many, many pages, and many, many URL’s that need rewriting. You don’t want to miss a single one because that will cause pages to not be indexed. However, the task of rewriting every single URL can be daunting and tedious. In Nav-to-Net, you are able to maintain a consistent URL structure dictated by rules you set. URL’s are automatically and dynamically generated and can be rewritten at any time with no coding required.

For more information, read this article on how to manage friendly URLs in NAV.

We also have this article about SEO tips for e-Commerce.