Many web site owners fail to realize that the URL of an individual page can affect how much search engine traffic it receives. Like titles and keywords, URL structure is an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Read on to learn more about the best practices for creating an SEO based URL structure…

Putting related search keywords in the URL will help improve a page’s ranking. However, it is best to separate these words so that search engine “spiders” (a.k.a. “robots”) can distinguish between them; otherwise, it just looks like one long word. Some people use underscore (_) symbols in between the keywords, but using a hyphen (-) is generally considered preferable for SEO. If the page has content people are likely to revisit regularly – such as updated news or weather – consider creating a page with a short, easy to remember URL (perhaps a subdomain) which redirects to the long URL. Make sure the longer address is linked to from the “Site Map”.

Using a long URL structure generally isn’t a problem with regard to SEO; search engines will still index very long (over 100 letters) URLs, and most web browsers can handle addresses which are thousands of characters long. Nonetheless, excessively long URLs are less appealing for people to use in print or email. There is no need to repeat words already used in the URL; don’t use a word in the filename that repeats the domain, directory, or subdomain name. The same applies to the page’s title and “keywords” META tag, but not the body/text of the page, where SEO keywords should be used several times.

As an example of applying these best practices to the structure of a specific URL, the file name for a page selling portable computers might be cheap-laptop-notebook-computer. The entire address would be something like www.example.com/shopping/cheap-laptop-notebook-computer.htm. Changing the directory name “shopping” to “buy” would best target keywords people are likely to search for. On some search engines, text files (.TXT format) are listed with the URLs as their titles; others use the first line of text for this purpose. The same goes for documents in PDF format.

Basically, the best practices for creating an SEO oriented URL structure include using keywords (or phrases) people search for, separating each word with a hyphen, and avoiding repetitive URLs. Applying these practices isn’t difficult, and has the potential to substantially increase traffic.

302 Redirect Answer From Google – Below is an exert from Matt Cutts blog (head internet guy at Google) discussing the 301 redirect and 302 redirect status code.

Q: Time out. I’ve got a question. What’s the deal with 302 redirect vs. 301 redirect? What does that mean? What’s the difference between 301 redirect and 302 redirect?

A: The “302″ redirect status code refers to the HTTP status codes that are returned to your browser when you request a page. For example, a 404 page is called a “404″ status code because web servers return a status code of 404 to indicate that a requested page wasn’t found.

The difference between a 301 redirect and a 302 redirect is that a 301 redirect status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location, while a 302 redirect status code means that a page has temporarily moved to a new location. For example, if you try to fetch a page http://example.com/ and the web server says “That’s a 301 redirect. The new location is http://www.example.com/” then the web server is saying “That url you requested? It’s moved permanently to the new location I’m giving you.”

Although Matt goes on to say that on-domain the 302 redirect SHOULD be handled by Google correctly now, meaning that it should figure out to show the front page instead of the redirected on-domain name but I believe there is no reason to leave this in Googles hands and the best practice would be to just show the root level home page.