A common mistake I see in Yahoo! stores is gibberish URLs that do nothing to help you in the search engine rankings. Here’s a workaround that can make your Yahoo! store URLs not only more search engine friendly, but also more user-friendly for your customers as well.

First, let’s take a look at the typical URL structure of a Yahoo! store:

http://store.mystore.com/id.html

Our main concern here is the id. Each page in your store has a unique id, and that id also serves as the name of your page in the URL. If you’re like most beginning Yahoo! store owners, you’re probably using the Section and Item buttons on your button bar to make new categories and products. The id is then automatically created from the Name field once you press Update to save your work.

The problem with this method is that the Yahoo! store editor creates the id by truncating each word in the name. So a product named Acme 1275 Green Widget would have the following URL:

http://store.mystore.com/ac12grwi.html

The id “ac12grwi” contains no useful keywords for the search engines to identify when ranking your store. It’s also much less user-friendly for your customers. If they wanted to type the URL directly in the browser, or explain to a coworker where to find your product, the odds of them remembering “ac12grwi” are pretty slim.

Here are a few easy steps to fix the problem:

1. First, check your button bar and see if there are two rows. If not, click the little red arrow at the end of the top bar to make the bottom row appear.

2. On the bottom row of your button bar, click the Contents button.

3. On the Contents page, you should see two different rows of buttons. On the bottom row, click the New button to make a new page.

4. Type the name of your product or category into the id box.

5. Choose the type “.item” to make a new category or product and press Continue.

6. Now you’re back in familiar territory. You can continue filling out all the fields, but notice the ID field at the top of the page. No more gibberish!

Once you save this page, your URL will look like this:

http://store.mystore.com/acme-1275-green-widget.html

Enjoy your new SEO friendly URLs!

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