 Questions To Ask Before Optimizing Your Query Strings!
Does your website use query strings?
Does your website pull information from a database?
Does your website have a Search Feature?
Does your website have extremely long URLS?
Is Google indexing all the pages on your website?
If the answer to these questions above is 'No', then you need to optimize your images on the website.
Why Optimize Your Query Strings?
Content is a major factor to any website. The more content you have within your website, the better chances of it ranking well on the search engines. Many Query Strings act as dead end to the search engines and therefore they can’t index many pages on some websites. This can limit the amount of material the search engine can see from your website. If your site is not being completely indexed on Google, then you may require a 'Mod-Rewrite' of your URLs. What a Mod Rewrite will do, is turn those long query strings that look like this: http://www.mysite.com/main.php?category=$category&subject=$subject into search engine friendly URL’s that can be read easily by the search engines
Does Your Server Allow Optimization Of Query Strings?
Your server must support mod_rewrite to make this possible. To find out if your server allows this, open Notepad, copy and paste the information below into a blank page.
<? php
phpinfo();
?>
Save it as info.php, upload it to your server. Now, invoke it by typing http://www.mysite/info.php into the address box of your browser. Now look at the parameters and look for mod_rewrite.
Now that you know how to convert these strings into search engine friendly URLs, you should also use proper naming conventions that would include keywords in the URL path.
If you are on a windows server, then using ISAPI_Rewrite would accomplish the same task but on a windows server.
More Resources On Optimizing Your Query Strings:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34431&topic=8522
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OPTIMIZING QUERY STRINGS