One of the richest areas of your site to beef up your SEO is in your URLs. Search Engine Friendly, or SEF, URLs contain words in the URL instead of ID numbers or other information that is useless to human readers. For example, see the URL for this blog post; it contains the same words as the title of this post.

Use URLs that are accurately descriptive and keyword-rich. Use only alphanumeric characters, and a small set of other allowable characters such as dashes or underscores. Use dashes as a separator, in place of spaces or other special characters; "contact-us.html" is better than "contactus.html". URLs should also refrain from becoming too long; one good rule of thumb is to try to keep your complete URL visible in the browser bar at once. Most CMSs like Joomla and WordPress will create SEF URLs for you automatically. If you must do it manually, you may need to get familiar with .htaccess files, if you haven't already.

Search Engine Friendly URLs will add a lot of value to your site's SEO; Google gives it the utmost regard. Many times URLs are used as anchor text, which increases the value of incoming links. SEF URLs also are more descriptive to human readers and help with clickthrough rates. If you decide to upgrade your existing URLs, be sure to update your broken links and update your sitemap!

Usually in the course of making changes to your site, you will come across some pages whose URLs need to change - say, in accordance with an updated page title - or which need to be removed completely. Making your URLs more accurate is fine, but many people forget to follow through on updating all of their links - big mistake!

The first step after changing a URL is to update all of your other pages which link to your old URL. Most CMSs like Joomla and WordPress will update all of your links automatically. If you don't use a CMS, this will probably be a more manual process. One way is with search engines; for example, if I wanted to update the URL for this blog, I would Google "link:http://aquabluemarketing.com/marketing-20-blog" to find which links Google had in its indices. Note that this is not guaranteed to find 100% of your existing links, however.

Once you have updated all links on your own site, you should setup a friendly redirect for residual links from search engines and other sites. Some CMSs have automatic URL redirects built-in, and some have components to assist you in forwarding your URLs (for example, Joomla has ReDJ). If neither of these applies to you, you should add 301 redirects to your .htaccess file.

This may seem like a lot of work, but if you are interested in maintaining traffic to your existing pages, it is a valuable investment.  Follow these steps and you will avoid losing the SEO value of your page!