SEF, or Search Engine Friendly, URLs are just that: website addresses that are easily indexed by search engines such as Google.  These URLs cannot contain special characters, such as a question mark, and so website URLs that contain those characters will not be indexed by search engines such as Google…that means Google won’t know the site is there, and so it won’t bring it up in a list of results, even if the search keyword matches the website.

Why do people use URLs that aren’t search engine friendly?  Query strings are a good way for pages within a website to “speak” to one another, and share information by passing it along to other pages within that particular website.  Because of the ease query strings bring to website URLs, some webmasters may be reluctant to give query strings the boot.  However, if they continue to use special characters in their website URLs, inclusion by search engines will be rare, if at all.

If you’ve noticed that your website doesn’t show up in Google, even after you’ve typed in the exact title of your website, there are a couple of possibilities as to why your website isn’t showing up.  You might have made a typographical error.  Although Google Suggest would likely prevent that from hampering your search, you might want to just verify that both your search keywords, and the information on your website, are spelled properly.  If your website is brand new, Google may not have gotten around to indexing it, in which case you can do little else but to be patient.

If, however, your site has been around for awhile, and you’re not making any typographical errors, look at the URL of the webpage you are trying to search for.  Look for any special characters, such as any of the following:

!@#$%^&*+=.

Characters such as those likely mean that your URL is not search engine friendly.  How do you get your URL to be SEF?  Your internet marketing agency can help you to change your URL so that it is SEF, and then your website should be able to be crawled and indexed by search engines such as Google.  After that it’s only a matter of time (shouldn’t be much time either) before your web pages are crawling with real prospects.