test please delete

[cailin maith]

Exactly how many giant alien lizards do you know?

Ummmmmmmm I only know the one.... and he is the bestest

[NickFitz]

By meaningful do you mean the keywords in the domain name and file names?

Meaningful paths are the key.

To take the example of a music shop with an online catalogue, it's better to have

http://example.com/instruments/bassoon
or
http://example.com/accessories/strings/rosin
or
http://example.com/scores/opera/LaTraviata.html

than http://example.com/product.php?pid=12345, or even http://example.com/catalogue/products/12345 (which leads to a page full of bassoons), which is a form some people seem to use for reasons that escape me.

[Jog On]

Meaningful paths are the key.

To take the example of a music shop with an online catalogue, it's better to have

http://example.com/instruments/bassoon
or
http://example.com/accessories/strings/rosin
or
http://example.com/scores/opera/LaTraviata.html

than http://example.com/product.php?pid=12345, or even http://example.com/catalogue/products/12345 (which leads to a page full of bassoons), which is a form some people seem to use for reasons that escape me.

I make sure all my URLs, domain names and filenames have keywords in – it’s a must!

This is my approach to traffic generation:

http://www.dot-dash.net/targeted-website-traffic.php

[zeitghost]

Of course he is - he is my bestest giant alien lizard mate, in the whole world.... whole universe in fact

[zeitghost]

Well that was a conversation stopper wasn’t it!

<cough>

That's TPD, that is... the ability to have conversations with many people separated by hundreds of posts will eventually come naturally...

[zeitghost]

I'm on Day 3 now

I'm ever so clever.

[NickFitz]

I make sure all my URLs, domain names and filenames have keywords in – it’s a must!

This is my approach to traffic generation:

http://www.dot-dash.net/targeted-website-traffic.php

I'd lose the php - either have no extension or use an .htaccess file to direct .html to .php if necessary (or configure the server accordingly, if possible).

If at some point down the line the client moves over to, say, ASP.Net hosting, all the URLs will suddenly break. The URL shouldn't give details of the server technology in use as that is liable to change. The .html extension is OK as ultimately, whether the page is a static file or a dynamically generated response, what the client actually receives is HTML.

This also means you can surface the same resource with different representations:

/bassoon.html for browsers,
/bassoon.xml for Ajax, mashups or Atom feed readers,
/bassoon.rss for RSS feed readers,
/bassoon.json for Ajax and mashups,
/bassoon.fbml for Facebook applications

which increases the number of ways in which the content can be reused and distributed so as to ultimately direct traffic to the business.

[zeitghost]

Stone me...

[NickFitz]

Stone me...

One other thing: it's probably worthwhile (at last) making judicious use of Microformats, as companies like Yahoo (which uses them extensively in its own properties) are starting to take account of them when indexing content - they're potentially a pretty big win for a trivial amount of additional effort

[Jog On]

I'd lose the php - either have no extension or use an .htaccess file to direct .html to .php if necessary (or configure the server accordingly, if possible).

If at some point down the line the client moves over to, say, ASP.Net hosting, all the URLs will suddenly break. The URL shouldn't give details of the server technology in use as that is liable to change. The .html extension is OK as ultimately, whether the page is a static file or a dynamically generated response, what the client actually receives is HTML.

This also means you can surface the same resource with different representations:

/bassoon.html for browsers,
/bassoon.xml for Ajax, mashups or Atom feed readers,
/bassoon.rss for RSS feed readers,
/bassoon.json for Ajax and mashups,
/bassoon.fbml for Facebook applications

which increases the number of ways in which the content can be reused and distributed so as to ultimately direct traffic to the business.

Is it easy to have no extension? I have gone PHP because I had an aweful time getting the .htaccess thing to work to enable PHP in HTML pages.

I like the look of filenames in URIs with no extensions - me want!