Ruby on Rails

Rails is one of the best frameworks for Search Engine optimization (SEO), at least if I compare it with frameworks I know about it. If you are not familiar with SEO, SEO is the process of optimizing the site for the sake of gaining more traffic from search engines.

I will post in details later about SEO. For now, if you are looking to SEO a site, you must at least make sure that your site can be crawled by search engine spiders. The following are examples of sites that spider can not crawl:

1) Site that is hidden behind a web form.
2) Site that uses 3 or more query parameters (very important for GoogleBot, its quite not problem for Yahoo Slurp).

Search engines can not submit forms and they feel scary from URL that has 3 or more query parameters since they may crawl large number of pages with the same content with different query parameters.

Furthermore, Rails do not use Sessions as parameter in the URL dislike most J2EE servers and Apache for users who have cookie disabled like Spiders. Having URL indexed with session make the search engines wondering if this URL will be render the same page that they crawled when the user click on it in their result page. They may feel that the session existence will render different page based on geographic location or language locale. Thus, Rails does not use sessions saved in URL and thats another cool feature for SEO.

Rails make it easy to build your user and search engine friendly. I have done a little SEO (mainly in keyworded URLs aspect) work in J2EE and in PHP, I found Rails far better in doing that job.

All what you need to do is to point URLs which can be represented using a string or regular expression. It is so easy to build search engine and user friendly URLs which is usually vitual.

Thus, Ruby on Rails helps you to create a search engine friendly site. However, do not forget that having SE friendly URL is not everything in SEO, you need to consider having the best title tag, meta tags, headers (h1, h2, h3, etc.), styles, internal linking, breadcrumb, external linking, site map, XML feeds, rich text pages, no spelling errors, avoid HTML bugs (specially in nested tables), keyword research and many more.

If you have question regarding SEO, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer you.

To learn more about Search engine Optimization, I would recommend you to read Los Angeles Search Engine Optimization Services. The blog describes SEO process step by step.