What makes a “friendly URL”?

Question

I\'ve read a great deal of discussion recently (both on this site and elsewhere) about \"friendly URLs\" but I\'m not sure what exactly makes a URL \"friendly\" and why we r

Answer 1

Well, for a start, try to keep characters apart from (a-z,A-Z,0-9) and of course :/._- out of the url. Not everyone has all of those on their keyboards (for example, I don't have & on my keyboard, neither do I have ~)

When for example, doing some url parsing or something alike, also helps if the url syntax is "clean"

Answer 2

First off, they're friendly to search engine crawlers. Google and others put a high value on words in the url that match words on the page, so if the title of your blog post is in the URL, it will help your search engine juice.

Secondly, they're friendly to people who don't know what they're visiting. Which of the links that you used for comparison are you more likely to click on if it comes across your twitter/email/IM/etc?