URL Rewrite SEO in IIS

Since the advent of search engines URL rewriting has become mandatory. It makes URLs look nicer and clearer in terms of what content to expect at the given URL. Recently I uploaded few static HTML files to an IIS site. I wanted a nice looking URL without .html extension which was quite straight-forward to achieve in ASP.NET site. You can install URL Rewrite Module in IIS 7 or above versions and a few configuration steps is all that is required to achieve the desired results.

Read this article from Microsoft to get in-depth understanding of the steps. Below is the sample web.config entry I had to make to achieve the results

<configuration>

  <system.webServer>

    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="Rewrite to .html Rule">
          <match url="^games/([_0-9a-z-]+)" />
          <action type="Rewrite" url="games/{R:1}.html" />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite> 

  </system.webServer>

</configuration>

You will need some understanding of the regular expressions to create a matching pattern for your URL (match tag in web.config) and map it to actual resource on the server which is defined in action tag. Here I am simply looking to match following condition for the URL

1. Starts with the sequence of characters “games/”.
2. Contains one or more alphanumeric or “_” or “-” characters after the first “/”.

And within 5 mins of effort I had a nice looking SEO friendly URL.