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

Revision as of 23:45, 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/cute-puppies ? People will see your URL in search results, at the top of their web browser while they're on your page, and any place where they may save the URL for themselves -- like in bookmarks, or an email.

• Give search engines one more indication of what your page is about, and what queries it should rank for. A URL without keywords won't hurt you, but it's a missed opportunity and a competitor with relevant keywords in their URLs may rank higher than you for it.

• 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. Shorter URLs are also easier to share on social sites like Twitter.
• 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 in your URLs.

In a URL, a ? or & indicates that a parameter (like id=1234) will follow.

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:

http://www.example.com/product?id=1234567&foo=abc123def&color=yellow&sort=price

• 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.

For usability, underscores get lost in underline.

So... example.com/adorable-kitten-pics is better than example.com/adorable_kitten_pics

That said, Wikipedia's links use underscores and they seem to be doing okay in search results :-)

• 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 (link to glossary) 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/articles/foo/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.

• Don't have too many subdomains.

A subdomain, or directory, is something that comes before the domain name in a URL. For example: http://blog.example.com Also, www. is technically a subdomain.

Too many subdomains can cause problems for search engine optimization. For more information, read Multiple Subdomains: Classic SEO Mistake.

How to Change Your URLs

In an ideal world, setting a friendly URL structure is something that would be done when a website is first created. Then it just works going forward without having to lift another finger.

If you have an existing site that already has pages, there should be a way to change your URL structure, but it could be a pain in the neck to change. 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 as with other changes on your website, if it's a lot of work to improve your URLs you will need to weight the costs and benefits. For example, SEOBook knows what they're doing, but opted to leave their URLs less SEO-friendly because... [pull in convo from twitter]

In addition to changing the URLs on your website itself, you can sometimes change the URL structure on your other web presences. For example, social sites like Facebook allow you to set a "vanity URL" to change something like Facebook.com/pages/Company-Name/123456789 to Facebook.com/CompanyName. See 7 Simple Facebook Tricks for instructions. Keep an eye out for this option on other sites if you want to make it easier for people to find them.