Larger companies with big websites have unique challenges when managing their search engine marketing initiatives. Not only do larger organizations have more layers of management, more departments, more stakeholders and conflicting constituencies when choosing vendors and implementing search engine marketing, their websites can be enormous. For this reason, website developers of large, complex websites often implement dynamic URLs and URL structures that are long, confusing, and conflict with search engine spiders. For example, you’ll find that many large retailers utilize query strings in their URLs. Query strings are added after simple domain names and contain character strings that begin with a question mark (?) and are comprised of other characters and values, separated by ampersands (&). Query strings are used to pass information between ASP pages. If your website must utilize query strings, use short query strings. Nowadays, most search engines will be able to crawl and index content within dynamic pages if the query string is not too long and complicated.
Furthermore, to ensure your URL structure is going to work for search engines, make sure your content is properly categorized. Sometimes the answer to categorizing content is the addition of sub-domains and other times it’s a matter of reworking content to better target search engine spiders and adding trigger words to ensure visitors stay intrigued and find the answers they are looking for.
