With the increase of e-commerce, content managed sites, blogs or any other tools that require your website to utilise a database, it’s becoming a lot more common to see dynamic URLs.

If you’re not sure what a dynamic URL is, here’s an example:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie&q=search+engine

You’ll notice that there are extra characters such as &, ?, = and + which are not usually allowed in a standard address, but some of these characters are required when a webpage has to query a database to display results.

Even though search engines are constantly improving and are able to index some dynamic addresses, it is best to avoid them for the following reasons:

• Dynamic URLs typically don’t rank as well as static URLs in the search engines.
• Search engines are known to index the content of static pages a lot faster than dynamic ones.
• Although this doesn’t strictly relate to SEO, static URLs are a lot easier to read and remember by end users.

How do you fix your site if it’s using dynamic URLs?

If it’s hosted on an Apache server, you can use mod_rewrite or for a similar Windows hosting solution, try IIS Mod-Rewrite which is just as good.

Search Engine Watch goes into great detail about how you can improve your dynamic URLs with their Mod rewrite tips and tricks and Aaron Wall from SEObook tells us How to Make Dynamic URLs Static.

One final thing to take note of is that when you go to the effort of rewriting your dynamic URLs, incorporating keywords in them certainly won’t hurt - sure using keywords in URLs isn’t as powerful as it used to be, but it’s still not a bad practice to try and keep. Talking about good practices, SEOmoz goes one better with 11 Best Practices for URLs.

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