Posted by MichaelC First, a quick refresher: URL prettying and 301 redirection can both be done in . htaccess files, or in your 404 handler. If you're not completely up to speed on how URL rewrites and 301s work in general, this post will definitely help. And if you didn't read last week's post on RewriteRule's split personality , it's probably helpful background material for understanding today's post. "URL prettying" is the process of showing readable,

Posted by MichaelC Apache webservers have a really cool and useful little feature called RewriteRule . It's sometimes referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of URL manipulation, because it's got two very important, often-used abilities: URL rewriting : turning dynamic, parameterized URLs into readable, keyword-loaded URLs 301s : to tell the browser )or search bot( that a page has been moved These are VERY different tasks,

Posted by MichaelC It's a well-known fact in the SEO world that Google shows enormous favoritism in its rankings to domain names that contain one or more of the keywords being searched for. If your domain name is a close match to the search keywords all glued together, it's as easy as fishing with dynamite to get on page 1 of the SERPs for that search phrase. While some )like me( might argue )like, against Rand( that it's a flaw in the algorithm,

Posted by MichaelC One of the best ways to build inbound links is to create an affiliate program. It's also a great way to drive real customer traffic from related sites. But...don't just sign up for one of the big third-party affiliate programs-you'll get the customers, but you'll be throwing away a terrific opportunity to get great inbound links. Today, I'm going to try and talk you into writing your own affiliate program from scratch.

Posted by MichaelC This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. We all know by this time about the benefits of converting your parameterized URLs to human- and crawler-friendly URLs, but the stock tools of the trade )ISAPI_Rewrite, mod_rewrite, etc.