What is a good way to have a SEO URL system built up in PHP?

Question

I want to have \"pretty\" and SEO oriented URLs in my site.

I\'ve build up my own tiny framework for this site and almost everything is complete now.

One thing I

Answer 1

Well, there are some ways to do this.

Widely adopted is using .htaccess, which you said don't wanna use. OK.

You still have some options:

• Using a database table to map everything is one.
• Using a routine to check existing files.
• Using a extended xml sitemap.
• Using a caching system.

Well, everything above can be mixed on your implemetation if you want.

You can find a good article for this on a list apart.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/succeed/

On this article the solution is a mix:

first check if a file exists (for example "about-us.php"); if yes, include the file contents, else

check db for this request (as a tip, you can have a field named "friendlyURL" on your main content tables). if exists, extract and display, else

show a 404 page. as a tip for this one, keeping the SEO feature in mind, I would recommend you to have a sitemap xml. If page is not found, you can check sitemap if is not a broken URL, like:

http://yourdomain.net/shoes/male/bro

you can check if some URL like: http://yourdomain.net/shoes/male/brown

and suggest it to your customers/visitors. Along with:

http://yourdomain.net/shoes/male/

http://yourdomain.net/shoes/

also a link for your HTML sitemap, and if you have a search feature on your site, also use it, display a link for user go to search page with that query.

http://yourdomain.net/search?q=shoes+male+bro

OR

[input type="text" name="q" value="shoe+male+bro"];

And another extra tech tip: make use of full-text search feature of your db if available.

A interesting reading comes from Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP creator: http://lerdorf.com/lca04.pdf (check page 34, about 404 redirects).