When it comes to choosing your site URL you’d better make the right choice because it definitely has a significant effect not only one your website SEO but also on user-friendliness.

To make things clear right off the bat let me state that you should use STATIC URLS.

Static URLs have clear advantages over dynamic URLs but before I point out the differences let me make it clear that Google can crawl both URLs even though they also do recommend the use of static URLs.

So why are static URLs preferable over dynamic URLs? Because according to a post in SEOmoz static URLS have the following advantages:

• Higher click-through rates in the SERPs, emails, web pages, etc.
• Higher keyword prominence and relevancy
• Easier to copy, paste and share on or offline
• Easy to remember and thus, usable in branding and offline media
• Creates an accurate expectation from users of what they’re about to see on the page
• Can be made to contain good anchor text to help the page rank higher when linked-to directly in URL format
• All 4 of the major search engines (and plenty of minor engines) generally handle static URLs more easily than dynamic ones, particularly if there are multiple parameters

Note though that according to Google if you already use a dynamic URL it is best to leave it alone since re-writing it just to make it look like a static URL can lead to more problems. As their search quality team said, “If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static…However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good.”

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Last post I gave a few tips on how to rank well in Google and Bing’s image search. Here are some more tips straight from Google’s Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye. According to Maile Ohye when inserting images in your web pages you should:

1. Use large sized images with good aspect ratio – Just in case you don’t know what an aspect ratio is, it is the width of an image divided by its height. The aspect ratio of an image is important because if you use images with unequal aspect ratios Google will prefer to display “better images” as an insert on the web as well as news search results. Using images with standard aspect ratios will affect not only your standing in Image Search but also in Google Web.

2. Use descriptive captions and alt text – I have mentioned this before so I don’t really need to expound on this matter but I just want to reiterate the need to use KEYWORDS in the captions and alt text.

3. Keep the image near the title/heading – If you are using several images in one page keep each image close to the paragraphs/text body it is related to.

4. Keep the images inline and use non-clickable version

5. Use jpeg format – Apparently Google prefers the jpeg format over other formats (e.g. PNG, BMP). I still haven’t figured out why but since they have expressly stated this fact then it is better to just obey.

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Image Search is becoming more and more important with search engines realizing that users are using image searches with greater frequency. Maybe one of the reasons for this is the fact that users can process search results with images 30% faster than results with plain text (at least Microsoft says so).

With this in it is very important that you also think of how well your images rank. According to WebProNews some of the things you can do to rank in Google’s image search include:

*Adding images to your Google Local Business profile;
*Enabling Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account;
*Adding images to local business citation source; and.
*Adding images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

On the other hand if your focus is ranking in Bing’s image search they say that you should:

*Name image files appropriately – For improved relevance, make sure that the file name describes the image appropriately.
*Alternative image text (alt text) matters – For increased optimization, make sure photos are properly described with alternative text tags, and ensure that test within any images is also
*Watch frame breaking – Sites that attempt to break frames make it more difficult for the image to display correctly within search.  Make sure you’re testing your site against the search engines.

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