How to make PHP pages search engine friendly

[Peter Murray]

Thomas Dowling wrote:

>David Moore wrote:
>  
>
>>I have found a few web pages that explain how to do this using
>>$path_info, etc., but I'm not having much luck with it. I have PHP loaded on
>>a Windows 2000 server.
>>    
>>
>Instead of "...script.php?var1=Alice&var2=Bob&var3=Carol" you'd have 
>"...script.php/Alice/Bob/Carol" and split the $_SERVER[PATH_INFO] 
>environment variable on the "/" character.  You may have more sensible 
>results if you strip off the leading slash first:
>
>   $foo = ereg_replace("^/", "", $_SERVER[PATH_INFO]);
>   list ($var1, $var2, $var3) = explode("/", $foo);
>  
>
I'm a big fan of doing this, and I think it should be done more often 
for the benefit of our users -- in Thomas' example, the latter is more 
more easy to transcribe, remember, or publish than the former. Not only 
are the pages more search engine friendly, but other benefit are that 
you can give predictable URLs for others to use and make an entire 
section of your website appear to be static when it is really 
dynamically generated.  I made great use of this at my previous 
employer.  All of the content of these URLs and subsequent links are 
dynamically generated (even the results of the search, as in the last 
example):

  http://www.law.uconn.edu/library/database/
  http://www.law.uconn.edu/courses/

Peter