Learn More About ExpressionEngine’s URI Segments
EE’s powerful URI Segment Variables are used throughout eeSiteKit, and having a basic understanding of them will help you learn eeSiteKit faster, and have more fun working with it.
Better SEO with ExpressionEngine
Search Engine Optimization Has Never Been So Easy
ExpressionEngine provides a pretty good 404 (Page Not Found) system called “Strict URLs” that requires a valid template group name be used in segment_1 of a URI, otherwise a 404 page is displayed. It also offers a way to check for some input variances in segment_2, but its segment_2 checks can fail and allow content to be displayed when segment_2 is misspelled and/or completely wrong. Also EE doesn’t currently validate segment_3 and this can also lead to some interesting situations with search-bots.
Introducing Smart Segment Validation for URI Segments 1, 2 and 3: eeSiteKit 2.0 accurately evaluates the contents of segments 1, 2 and 3 of inbound URIs and redirects invalid requests to a 404 page with correct headers.
This helps prevent search-bots from indexing nonexistent pages on your site and prevents EE from displaying a run-on page of content while trying to dynamically interpret the bad URI. You can test it out here by removing any part of segments 1, 2 or 3 in the URIs of this site to see Smart URI Segment Validation in action. Try adding a made up word or misspell a word in segments 1, 2 or 3 and you should be directed to a 404 page.
Permalinks for Entry Archiving: eeSiteKit gives each entry a true achievable permalink while keeping the human readable title and three-level nested URI’s. This also gives us a unique ID number we can use for better accuracy when two entries in a site have an identical title, and with multilingual entries. An eeSiteKit-styled permalink for this entry would look like this:
http://eesitekit.com/features/seo/better-seo-with-expressionengine/158/
Nested Page Titles That Put Keywords First: By default, eeSiteKit provides a unique page title for the home page of the site, and nests page titles for all other pages with the entry title first. This helps put keywords from your entry titles in the search result title links. It also provides great navigational feedback information for your site visitors.
Dynamic Sitemap: eeSiteKit’s dynamic sitemap keeps an up-to-date record of your site’s pages for search-bots.
Robots-Noindex: We even added a dynamic Robots-Noindex meta tag to help avoid the potential for duplicate content on some pages like your search results, tell-a-friend and print pages.
