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

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Your URLs provide an opportunity to let search engines and people know what your page is about. Conversely, if you don't pay attention to your URLs, they may provide no value for your site's SEO (search engine optimization) or for your human visitors, either. Badly designed URLs may even trip up search engines or make them think you're spammy.

• Include a few important keywords in your URLs.

A keyword-infused URL can:

• Help visitors see that the page they're on 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. A competitor who's placed relevant keywords in his URLs may rank higher than you for those keywords.

• Keep your URLs to fewer 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 and StumbleUpon.
• Long URLs can look like spam. As the URL gets longer, the ranking weight given to each word in the URL gets spread thin, and becomes less valuable for any specific word.

You can manually check the character count of all your URLs to make sure they're not too long. The AboutUs Site Report can do it automatically, 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

Too many query parameters can cause search engine robots to enter a loop and keep crawling the same pages over and over again. You could end up with search engines failing to index some of your most important pages.

• Use hyphens instead of underscores in your URLs.

Search engines see underscores as a character. This means that your keywords will be seen as a single long keyword, and you'll lose any SEO benefit they could have incurred. A hyphen, however, is seen as a space that separates words. Hyphens are better for SEO because they allow search engines to interpret your web page as relevant for more keyword phrases.

For usability, underscores get lost in underline.

People can't see underscores when there's an underline present as well.

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 living many folders away from the root domain (link to glossary) is less important. So it's best to organize all of your important content so each URL has no more than two subfolders.

Here's another way to think about it: Make sure your URLs have 3 or fewer 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.

Warning! If you change existing URLs on your website, make sure to permanently redirect (using a 301 redirect) the old URL to the new one. You don't want to send people or search engines to the right place, not a 404 error page. One thing to keep in mind here is that the 301 redirect will get people and search engine spiders to the right page, but a small percentage of the PageRank or link juice will not make it all the way to the final page/URL.

Is it worth it to change your URLs? The above list are best practices for URLs and they can help your SEO, but as with other changes on your website, it's good to consider the potential costs and benefits of the change. For example, how much work will it be and what are the possible SEO benefits and downsides? For example, SEOByTheSea.com knows what they're doing, but opted to leave their URL structure as is (without keywords) because it would be a large amount of work for a 6-year-old website and because of the potential SEO loss from redirecting.

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.