Create Search Friendly URLs

Overview

This article provides information that you should consider when deciding on the folder names (directories) and page names to use for your web pages, products, product categories, etc in CIMcloud.  The goal is to help you make your content rank higher in search engines (referred to in this article as making “search engine friendly” URLs).  For the purposes of this article, we will generically refer to any content records (including web pages, products, product categories, etc) as “content”.

Intended Audience for This Article

This article applies to CIMcloud clients that have public (or anonymous) facing content that they want to get indexed/listed in search engines.

Details

When configuring the SEO settings for each content record, a unique URL (the actual web address or link that your customers see and click on) will need to be configured.  Configuring the URL occurs in the Search Engine Settings section of the Worker Portal.  These URLs are used by search engines when listing the page.  Having a search friendly URL, for each content page in your site, can increase your chances of getting listed and ranked in search engine.  It is an important part of your overall search engine optimization efforts.

The following are some helpful tips when choosing how to set up your content URLs:

• The most important keywords should be included in the URL.
  • Typically the most important keywords are the product’s or page’s name, but can sometimes be dimensions or other describing factors.
• Directories (the content between the ‘/’ characters before the page name) should make sense.
  • Typically, these directories would be the same, or similar, to the breadcrumbs or categories for the product.
• Try to use distinct words.
  • This means that you should not repeat any words in the URL.  This includes duplications in the directories and the page name.
    • Examples:
      • /food/fruit/apple-fruit.asp
        • This is BAD because it duplicates the keyword ‘fruit’ in the URL.
      • /food/fruit/red-apple.asp
        • This is GOOD as it only has unique keywords and has more keywords in the URL.
• Group product structures using the product categories as the directories in the URL structure.
  • When using a URL for a product, it is typically best to use the product category or breadcrumbs to allow the search engines to cluster these like products.

Search friendly URLs are a very complex topic and can be very specific to your exact needs.  Read Google’s documentation documentation on the subject.

How to Manage Friendly URLs (Static Pages)

This article on Search Engine Settings includes more details on the Static Pages feature, which is what is used to create search engine friendly URLs for content records like web pages, products, and product categories.

Results

A search friendly URL is created and configured for your content pages.