Critical SEO Best Practices

[mandy]

URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs: Does your URL structure look something like this: www.mystore/pagegen.asp?product=123&session=107342587867&source=usatoday_ad? Pages with URLs that contain session IDs or tracking parameters are deadly to SEO because they result in duplicate content and PageRank dilution. If you're unable to ditch the session IDs or tracking parameters, you can still eliminate this SEO problem with conditional redirects or “good cloaking.”

Static-looking URLs: The most palatable URLs to spiders are the ones that look like they lead to static pages. That's because the spiders are less likely to end up in a “spider trap” — an infinite loop where the spider unwittingly follows links to the same content but at varying URLs.

So you may want to reconsider your URLs if they look something like www.yourdomain.com/pagegen.asp?productID=1234&category=123&storeID=1234&catalogID=1234&langID=1&photos=ON&bct=123;456;789, for example. A more search-engine-friendly URL would be www.yourdomain.com/product/1234.

You can achieve such static-looking URLs when you run a dynamic Website by rewriting your URLs with a server module/plugin like mod_rewrite...

full article: http://multichannelmerchant.com/webchannel/search/