Friendly URLs are a great way to improve SEO, promote linking and generally make your web application look more professional. If you have already hopped on to the MVC bandwagon then you don’t need to worry about it, friendly URLs are one of the great many benefits to using ASP.NET MVC. However, if you are still using web forms you will have to go through a couple extra steps to get the same effect.
Just in case you don’t know what a friendly url is, “friendly URLs” (aka “Pretty URLs”, “Beautiful URLs”, “URL Rewriting”, “URL Mapping”, “SEO URLs”, etc.) I am talking about pages or resources that are identified by keywords in a pseudo-directory structure. For Example, you have a web application with a search page. In a standard web forms application your URI will probably look something like this:
http://your.address/Search.aspx?query=friendly
In a friendly URL structure, your URI would look something like this:
http://your.address/search/friendly
This is a much leaner and cleaner looking link. Really better in every way, though if you are still using ASP.NET web forms you will have to go through some trouble to make your links look like that. As well as having to deal with maintaining the rules and code to support it. It may very well not be worth the trouble.
If your web application is consumer facing and relies on search engines for traffic then you should probably implement friendly URLs in some form for your app.
