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phpapacheiisseosearch-engine

Search-Engine Friendly URLs with IIS

I am working on building a search-engine friendly CMS. I know that perhaps one of the biggest keys to having and SEO site is to have search-engine friendly URLs. So having a link like this:

http://www.mysite.com/product/details/page1

will result in much better rankings than one like this:

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?pageID=37

I know that to create URLs like the first one, I have one of two options:

  • use a web technology, in this case PHP, to create a directory structure
  • leverage IIS to have these SEO URLs passed to PHP for proper processing

As far as the PHP goes, I'm pretty comfortable with anything. However, I think the first option would be more difficult to maintain.

I don't have any experience with IIS (my experience is limited to Apache), but I am required to use IIS for this client for which I am building this CMS, since they have a server running PHP on IIS 6. Could someone show me to write an IIS 6 equivalent of an .htaccess file, which will:

  • silently direct SEO URLs to a processor script
  • not redirect if the requested URL is an actual directory on the server

This application will be deployed on the client's server, and I will not have root access to it at any point.

Is there a better way than the way I am trying it?

Thank you for your time.

Solution

  • For IIS 6 I think your best bet is to use IIRF. It's a native filter for IIS that enables configurable URL rewriting using a mostly-compatible .htaccess syntax.

    It's compatible with any platform that IIS can serve (.NET, ASP, PHP, Ruby, etc), it's well-maintained and documented.