Difference between revisions of "Learn/Improve-Your-URLs-for-Better-SEO"

Revision as of 21:33, 3 May 2011

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Your URLs are an opportunity to let search engines and people know what your page is about. But if you don't care for your URLs they may provide no SEO or human value, and they may even trip them up or hurt you.

Clean and informative URLs look better to people and are more easily digestible by search engines.

• Include a few important keywords in your URLs.

A keyword-infused URL helps:

• Make it more clear to your visitors that the page is really what they're looking for. Would you rather see example.com/blog/219058 or example.com/blog/thing-you-searched-for ?
• Give search engines one more indication of what your page is about, and what queries it should rank for.

• Keep your URLs to less than 115 characters.

• Research shows that people click on short URLs in search results twice as often as long ones.
• Long URLs can look like spam, plus as the URL gets longer the ranking weight given to each word in the URL gets spread thin and is less valuable.

You can manually check the character count of all your URLs to make sure they're not too long, or the AboutUs Site Report can do that for you and point out any URLs that are longer than 115 characters.

• Don't use more than a few query parameters (?, =, and &) in your URLs.

Here's an example of an okay URL (the kind you use to track your marketing in Google Analytics) with 2 query parameters:

http://www.example.com/page?source=facebook

Bad URL with too many query parameters: [need example]

• Use hyphens instead of underscores in your URLs.

Search engines see underscores as a character and this effectively means that your keywords will be stuck together. On the other hand, a hyphen is a space that separates words. Hyphens are better for SEO because they allow search engines to interpret your web page as being relevant for more keyword phrases. That said, Wikipedia's links use underscores and they seem to be doing okay :-)

Example: http://www.example.com/this-is-what-the-page-is-about is better than http://www.example.com/this_is_what_the_page_is_about

• Keep all of your content less than 3 subfolders deep.

A subfolder is a folder that is visible in a URL between two slashes. For example, in http://www.example.com/articles/name-of-page, articles is a subfolder and "name-of-page" is an article in that subfolder.

When it comes to subfolders, search engines assume that content that is many folders away from the root domain is less important. It's best to keep all of your content less than 3 subfolders deep.

In other words, make sure your URLs have 3 or less slashes (/) after the domain name. Here is an example URL that is a web page that is two subfolders deep:

http://www.example.com/subfolder-1/subfolder-2/page-name.htm

Bonus: Using subfolders allows you to use "content drilldown" in Google Analytics to easily view data for all the pages in the subfolder.

How to change your URLs

It can be a pain in the neck to change some things on your website. Most content management systems (CMS) allow you to change your default URL structure, or individual URLs for pages... but you have to find that setting or option. If you use WordPress, see WordPress: Built for SEO for details on how to enable SEO-friendly URLs, or permalinks.

One thing to keep in mind: The above list are best practices for URLs and they can help your SEO, but if it's a lot of work for you.

For example, SEOBook knows what they're doing, but opted to leave their URLs less SEO-friendly because...

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/common-url-related-seo-mistakes

Multiple Subdomains: Classic SEO Mistake

With many out-of-the-box content management systems you run the risk of creating SEO unfriendly URLs. A very common and simple example to consider is WordPress. With a basic installation, the default permalink structure in WordPress is structured to look something like:

http://www.abccompany.com/?p=123

A URL structure like that does nothing to tell search engines what the page is about. You’re missing out on the opportunity to include keywords in the URL. Instead, configure your URL structures to work in a more SEO-friendly manner. For example:

http://www.abccompany.com/internet-marketing/seo

There are two ways companies can get in trouble with URLs: first, by creating poor ones to begin with; second, by not using best SEO practices when attempting to fix them.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-waste-money-on-seo/28385/#ixzz1Fxao3F5p

from http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-waste-money-on-seo/28385/

• Customize your URL on Facebook -- link to 7 Tricks

• Don't miss out on other opportunities to use your keywords -- titles, meta descriptions, headings