I have always been a little frustrated by the fact that good serach engine rankings relied on "static web pages" versus the normal database-driven dynamic content. It seems to be a popular and (truthful??) belief that Google a few others don't take well to a query string. Which is a real pain in * for people like me.

Is this really true? Does it really make that much of a difference?

Looking for feedback on this...

* - edited by Mitch

I just talked with a professional web site designer who builds web sites from the ground up and then sells them. He gave me some good advice on keywords and meta tags. There is a lot of competition for popular keywords, so for example with my site he recommended I use "funny comics" instead of "funny, comics". Small things like that can generate a lot more traffic for your site. There is a free tool for you to determine some good keywords to use for your site. Pick the ones that have about 50-1000 searches.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

No, it doesn't definitely help SEO. The whole debate is over whether "static" URLs are friendlier to search engines than "dynamic" URLs. In the old days they definitely were, but now it's probably a moot point.

The idea was to produce static  links and page addresses that looked like

/products/100.htm

and to have code in your .htaccess to convert it to dynamic  URLs that your code could deal with:

/product.php?id=100

It's probably unnecessary these days, although you will still find people that swear by it.

OK, it's well known that you shouldn't have session IDs or other "one time" stuff in a query string, that would prevent someone from coming in a second time on a saved URL. But otherwise, are there really any major search engines that still have trouble dealing with dynamic URLs? From what I've heard, there are still a few second or third tier search engines that haven't been updated, but is that any reason to go through the effort of writing out "static" URLs and then having your .htaccess go through the CPU cycles of converting them back to dynamic form? Is there something specific that makes search engines gag on a dynamic URL and refuse to index it? Do they pick up keywords in the URL better if they're in the form of directories rather than key=value  pairs?

How many users out there actually go through the effort to type in a long URL (whether static or dynamic), rather than just bookmarking a page they're on? For those that do, do they really report more trouble with dynamic URLs than with static?

The debate over SEO and "static" URLs is beginning to sound like the "Ford vs. Chevy" debate, where prejudices are learned at your father's knee and you argue until you're blue in the face while bystanders roll their eyes as they walk back to their dependable Hondas and Toyotas. Can anyone quote up-to-date chapter and verse from Google, et al., that say one way is better than the other? And why?  I'm perfectly willing to implement static "search engine friendly" URLs on my sites, but I'd like to know that it really accomplishes something and I'm not wasting time and effort doing that.

Like the man said, "Just the facts, ma'am."

i think the query string use to be a problem for search engines like google, but not anymore.

i do think it's better to have them rewritten but if those pages have already been indexed and are doing well in the rankings i'd leave it.

I use the rewrites for several online shopping carts to make them more "SEF" and it does work...however each page is optimized different for the keywords we are trying to rank them for.