Naming Conventions for Subjects, Model numbers and other items used in SEO URLs
Jul/7/2010
With Version 4 of the Tradepoint Ecommerce platform all URLs including
knowledge base, press releases and even all images are now Search Engine
Optimized (SEO) to ensure that the search engines have all of the information
that they need to effectively index your site to the greatest potential.
To do so, we enabled the use of the Subject of press releases and knowledge
base articles, and the Caption of images to ensure that they were properly
named. We automatically replace spaces with either underscores (_) or dots (.)
depending on your preference to maintain obviously word separation for the
search engines. However there are many other characters that you might choose to
put in your Subjects and captions that should be avoided to ensure that these
will both link properly and be search engine optimized.
While it can be tempting to use the & in categories and products and even
press release subjects etc. these should be strictly avoided as they are a
restricted character. As should question marks, and slashes (both forward slash
/ and back slash \). Any character above the numbers on your keyboard should
also be avoided as a general rule.
A full list of restricted characters can be found here: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm
Note: It is important to also avoid the use of whichever
character that you choose to use to replace spaces as per above, as they will be
switched back to spaces for matching purposes and your URL will
not be found resulting in a security violation page being
presented to users.