Note: This tip is geared more towards system admins and web masters who manage Windows web servers.

One of the big SEO items which web sites can implement is including keywords in the actual URL (for example, see the URL of this post). While this is convenient for the end users and search engines, in order for web sites to accomplish this, usually there has to be a ’smoke screen’ between what the URL displayed is and what the underlying system actually processes. This conversion process is called URL rewriting (deferring to Wikipedia for a definition).

While Apache web server supports this as part of the server itself, IIS admins can easily add this functionality using one of the following free plugins (among others):

• For IIS 7: URL Rewrite Module. This is a really slick extension as it allows you to basically define rules without having to know the underlying regular expression. Available for free.
• For IIS 5/6: Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter. Free extension which supports IIS 5+. This one requires you to know how to write regular expressions for your translations… or just search the Internet for the system you use.

I’m not really going to go into any more detail as this would be outside the scope of this tip. I just wanted to point IIS admins in a general direction to components which I have had a tremendous amount of success with.