URI Rewriter

Background

As companies use bigger and more powerful e-commerce tools to upgrade their web presence, a wider variety of software tools appear on the shelves to handle all or some of the commonly expected e-retail experience. Everyone from Microsoft™ and IBM™ to BroadVision™ and Storefront™ has an e-commerce offering that caters to small, medium and large companies. The one thing that is web addresses are getting increasingly long and unwieldy. Remember the days when you could tell a friend to go to www.somethingorother.com/onepagename.html? These days, companies need to implement such features as "email this link" and "permalink" to handle this.

In a different market space, increased competition among companies has caused them to examine more closely how the industry-best search engines work and hire the services of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts to help them ensure that their products appear at the top of the search rankings. One of the most common pieces of advice given by SEO specialists is to keep page URLs simple and clean. In other words, the more parameters found by the Search Engine crawlers, the greater the number of varieties of potentially the same URL, which leads to a lower likelihood of a single URL getting ranked highly. Alternately, since modern e-commerce tools rely on a large string of Query String parameters in the URL in order to maintain state, these two situations seem mutually exclusive.

Solution

This is where the URI Rewrite tool fits in. The URI Rewrite tool uses a technology called ISAPI (Internet Server Application Programming Interface). This is a technology that allows programmers to tap into Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) Web Server and examine or modify incoming requests and outgoing responses. One of the basic functions of the URI Rewrite tool is to receive requests for simple, human-readable URLs (URIs), and translate them into more complex versions that are parsible by an e-commerce tool such as Endeca. When the pages are returned to the user (or the search engine crawler), the URL still looks the same as when the user first arrived at the site, with no trace of any query string or Endeca parameters. The benefit to SEO is in the fact that you can change your website to use Endeca, and not worry about your URLs looking different to Search Engines like Google. Since search engines like Google will downgrade your rankings if you change your URLs, you site will suffer from a lower hit count. The URI Rewrite tool will allow you to use Endeca, and keep the same URLs on the outside, while allowing Endeca to use its rich parameter set to maximize the navigation and in-site searching for your users.

Over and above the SEO ability, the URI Rewrite tool will allow you to craft friendlier URLs for your users that are more descriptive of the products they are viewing, and the area of the site they are visiting. The URI Rewrite tool is a common sense approach to keeping your Search Engine rankings high, and turning your visitors into customers.