Practice What You Link

I have noticed a growing trend of companies to create positions to handle the strategic direction for search engine optimization. (Man that was mouthful). Most small business, like the ones I mostly do business with, can't afford to hire someone fulltime to handle this responsibility. So, they outsource these duties to a consultant. More times than not, the consultants themselves can't tell you strategies or tatics that you can't find yourself with a little bit of research and a lot less cost.

One of the common tips that you will come across is making all of your URLs SEF (Search Engine Friendly). Like most things computing, SEF can have different connotations. The most basic of which has to do with the removal of query strings. Let's look at a common scenrio:

You have a gallery of images that have mulitple pages. The url for the first page might be, http://somehost.com/portfolio/. When search engines crawl through your site they will index the content found on that page. When the user clicks on page 2 of your portfolio site then the url might look something like this: http://somehost.com/portfolio/index.php?start=2&page=2. Though that link has different content, it never gets index because Google, Yahoo!, etc. see the same page (index.php) linked again.

Solution:
Using mod_rewrite (Apache) a developer can 'reconstruct' the urls to make sure that crawlers/spiders will index the content that is found on these subsequent pages. The url for the above example might look like this: http://somehost.com/portfolio/start/2/page/2.

Like anything else search engine optimization can get quite detailed and fine grained, but so can mathematics, but most people are very successful knowing the basic arethemitc, not quantum physics.

For further information on basic tips to help optimize your current site please visit any of the links below.

The Beginners Guid to Top Google Rankings

Pagination Gallery Examples and Good Practices

Google

Search Engine Optimization