Future customers will find your business through search engines such as Google, so being visible is a key component to your websites success. Every few months Google will visit your website to see if there are any new pages which should be added to their directory. This technique is called a “spider” and its job is to look through your website pages and add the ones it finds.
In order to make the “spiders” job easier and to promote a good search engine listing, it’s very important that your website presents itself correctly. Take the following example -- a complex website link can limit a pages ability to rank well with a search engine.
http://www.greensprocket.com/blog.asp?id=46
This link works well for dynamic websites but it will have reduced results with search engines. This is where the technique of URL Rewriting comes into play where we can take a long link and rewrite it into something smaller and easier to digest.
http://www.greensprocket.com/blog/46/
To a search engine this second link is much easier to use. Instead of listing a page to index (blog.asp) along with a page ID (?id=46) we’re simply presenting the search engine with a folder (/blog/46/).
This can also be taken a step further where the number 46 can be changed to a keyword which describes the content of the page being viewed.
http://www.greensprocket.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/
Using a keyword in the link helps search engines understand the contents of your page and this in turn will improve your search engine ranking.