Learn/Improve-Your-URLs-for-Better-SEO

By [[User:|]] on

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.

“	If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.	”
—Matt Cutts of Google

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.

Technically speaking, you want to really make sure that your URLs are less than about 250 characters because of some technical limits out there: Applications written in .Net can only access URLs less than 260 characters. (Ditch this?)

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.

Okay (2 query parameters): http://www.example.com/page?source=facebook (like Learn/Track-Your-Marketing-in-Google-Analytics)

Not cool: [need example]

Why is this bad?

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

Use WordPress? See WordPress: Built for SEO for details on how to enable SEO-friendly URLs, or permalinks.

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.

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