SEO friendly URL's

ht tp://wheelfront.com/vehicle/?fno=6717&fmake=&fmodel=&fseries=&fcolour=&fwheel=

EDIT: the above link isn't showing correctly in my first post, but if you go to the homepage and click on any of the thumbnails down the page you will see the URL's generated.

I've tried responding twice now, but nothing will post, but to summarize, indexing query strings is a bad idea and can lead to pages getting dropped from search engine results. Google "avoiding the pitfalls of url parameters".

Thanks vfontjr - I saw your longer reply in an email notification but oddly it doesn't appear on here.

The links I currently have (ht tp://wheelfront.com/vehicle/?fno=6717&fmake=&fmodel=&fseries=&fcolour=&fwheel=) include the query strings which I do NOT want for the reasons you have pointed out.

I want to be able to change them so it is more SEO friendly (i.e. http://wheelfront.com/vehicle/bmw-m3-f80-305forged-ft101-stealthgrey/)

I had a look at the permalink settings but couldn't find a way to customise how I want it above. I'll have another look though.

How are you generating your page? It looks like you're using Visual Composer to build your pages. Did you insert a view on the page to generate the listings? But then again, it doesn't look like a standard Formidable view from the source code. Even the single car page looks like custom work to me. BTW, you may not be aware of this, but Visual Composer is one of the page builders that trashes your content if you ever move away from using it. If you'd like to learn more about this, we can discuss offline.

In general, when you use a view, you have to use the query string structure to access Formidable's entry content. Content entries don't have permalinks. They are not a post type. They are raw data elements to be displayed in a form or view. In order to use permalinks, you have to create posts out of the form entries. A SEO friendly permalink is based primarily on the post's title.

When you create a post with Formidable, there is a field mapping exercise that takes place when you setup the post structure. You have to assign a form field to the post title, and each form field is mapped to other post elements or custom fields.

At this point, you have a lot of content. Your site says you have over 3,700 vehicles. Creating posts out of that content to have a SEO friendly URL structure will require a significant amount of custom work. This can be done by looping through all of your entries and creating posts with a custom function. As a default, posts created in Formidable are linked to the entry. Delete the entry and the post will be deleted as well, although you can unlink the posts from the entry and keep them independent of each other.

The entry form would have to be modified to create posts when new vehicles are added.

You may also have to change the search to search posts instead of the form entries, but I'm not sure about that at this point.

Finally, you'd have to setup a 301 redirect structure, probably using regular expressions, to reroute all query string URLs that may have been indexed to the proper SEO titled URL. This will help to not lose page ranking. When I do a site search for your domain name on Google, it's only showing 337 pages as being indexed. With the large amount of content you have, you should have a lot more showing in the index. So, unless your site is brand new within the last few weeks, there's definitely something not right with the way it's been built.

Also, your site should also be setup with SSL so it's not being flagged in browsers as having insecure content that also reduces your SEO ranking and will get you listed behind your competitors. I can also see other problems with your site that are probably preventing you from converting more customers, but that's a completely different discussion.

Thanks again - I think you're right, lots of work involved! I will speak to a couple of developers about it, and also the indexing problem.

SSL has now been sorted.

In case you didn't know, the community volunteers that answer questions on this site are independent devs. Just sayin... Lol!