These days, website content is often generated dynamically. On a lot of websites, a single page (or script) is used to generate multiple pages of content on the website. For example, on a blog, you might have a single page named article.php that generates every article on your blog. Or perhaps you have a shop on which you have a single page named product.php, which generates the content for every product on your shop. The way this works is by parsing a variable in the URL, usually an ID number, then retrieving the page content from a database. For example, to display a product on a shop, where the product’s ID number in the database is 37, you might have: www.shop.com/product.php?id=37.

With SEO becoming such an important part of web design, many of us will want our URLs to contain keywords wherever possible. When you create a static website, you name each page on the website manually. For example, if you had a page titled “McBonio explains SEO”, you might name it “mcbonio-explains-seo.htm”. However, in the case of single scripts that generate multiple pages of content, like the above example, our URLs don’t tend to contain the name or title of the content generated. In this case, how would we get our keywords into our URL?

The solution lies in htaccess. For those of you who don’t already know, htaccess is a configuration file that lies in the root directory of a website. Its file name is simply “.htaccess”. It has various uses, such as telling browsers (and search engines) that a website’s location has permanently changed (e.g. when you have moved a website to a new domain name). Using htaccess, we can combat our problem of generating SEO-friendly URLs dynamically.

Specifically, what we’ll be doing is directing the user to a fake URL that contains our keywords. Then, in our htaccess file, we will use the rewrite engine (this is used to modify the appearance of URLs) to redirect the user from the fake URL to the real one.

In the above example, we have a page called product.php and we are are parsing a variable to that page called “id”. When the page receives the “id” variable, it uses it to retrieve the product information from a database. What we want is the name or title of the product – we will use this for our fake URL. For the sake of argument, let’s say that our product’s ID is 37 and its name is “Pink Shirt and Tie”. The first thing we need to do is generate the fake URLs on our website – we need to do this wherever we link to the page on the website. So, with our pink shirt example, our link needs to change from product.php?id=37 to product-37-Pink Shirt and Tie. Our links therefore take the following form <a href=”product-37-Pink Shirt and Tie”>

Next, we edit our htaccess file. We need to add three lines; the first two lines turn on the rewrite engine, the third line modifies our URL. The three lines are as follows: -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^product-([0-9]+)-(.+)?$ product.php?id=$1

The first two lines are pretty straight-forward. Let’s analyse the third line – this is where the magic happens. I’ve illustrated the three key parts to this line in the image below. The first part, “RewriteRule”, simply states that we are creating a rule. We then provide two arguments; the second part is the URL we want to modify and the third part is the way in which we want to modify it:

We want to modify any URL that starts with “product-”, continues with a number, is followed by another “-”, then ends with pretty much anything. You will see that the two parts that follow “product-”, either side of a “-”, are wrapped in brackets. This identifies them as items of data for the purpose of the second argument. This is illustrated below, in red text:

RewriteRule ^product-([0-9]+)-(.+)?$ product.php?id=$1

The third and final part of the line is what we want to do to the URL – in other words, what we want to change it to. We want to load product.php and parse the variable “id”, so we take the number part of the fake URL and put it on the end of our real URL. The number part of the fake URL is the first part after “product-” (this is the first item of data illustrated in red text above). The way we retrieve this is with “$1” in the second argument – this simply calls the first item of data from the URL we wish to modify. If we wanted the second item of data, we would use “$2”, and so on. But we only need the first part, i.e. the product’s ID number, so we ignore everything after that. In other words, the following three URLs would all have exactly the same effect: -

product-37-Pink Shirt and Tie
product-37-pinkshirtandtie
product-37-Mcbonio loves wearing pink shirts!

…because we are only processing the fake URL as far as the ID number. All three of the above URLs would point to: product.php?id=37

If you are SEOing URLs within a directory, simply amend the third line of the htaccess code to include the directory as follows (I’ve used “shop” as the directory name):

RewriteRule ^shop/product-([0-9]+)-(.+)?$ shop/product.php?productID=$1

That’s it – I hope you found it easy to follow and have successfully started dynamically generating SEO-friendly URLs on your website. Please bear in mind that I’m not an expert on htaccess and, as I write this, I have had several glasses of wine (and a Jaffa Cake). However, it works perfectly on my websites – so it should work for you too. If you have any comments, suggestions, criticisms or anything else that you’d like to contribute, please don’t hesitate to scroll down and do your thing. Thanks for taking the time to read this