Here are our top tips to on how to optimize your URLs for SEO.
Your websites URLs can be optimized to help with your websites’ search engine optimization – as with many things relating to SEO every little helps!
Having well-crafted URLs is not the most important SEO ranking factor, but it can help you do that little bit better than your competition – which is what SEO is all about.
What is a URL?
A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator – the location of your webpage or file on the internet – your webpage’s address.
Just as a house usually has a street address, web pages also have a unique address to help people and search engine crawlers find them – a URL.
To see a webpage’s URL look in the address bar near the top of your internet browser – on a desktop computer the whole address should be visible – on a mobile phone only the first portion will be visible without scrolling across it.
Typically a a webpage’s URL is made up of several sections for example:
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/website-maintenance/
It is made up of:
- a domain name – here – jspwebdesign
- a domain category – here – .co.uk
- a path – here – /website-maintenance/
Our Top Tips To Optimize Your URLs For SEO
URLs should be easy to read (and remember)
Search engines and your audience read the URLs words to find out what the page is about. So they should be easy to read and understand to show what your content is about.
For example:
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/seo/
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/general/150421_article7b=?
The top URL indicates the webpage is about SEO – the bottom URL does not give any clues as to what the webpage is about.
Make sure your URLs help your audience and search engines know what your webpage is about.
Make sure your URLs help organise and prioritise your content.
Search engines regard web pages in the ‘root folder’ as the top content that should be prioritised over other URLs. The further a web page is away from the root folder the less priority it will get.
For example – https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/ will be regarded as a higher priority than https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/category/subcategory/seo/
Having a well-structured URL hierarchy shows Google that your website has topical relevancy, depth and substance that helps with the websites creditability and value.
Avoid using underscores in URLS – use hyphens instead
If you are using separate words in your URLs then use hyphens to separate words rather than using underscores or leaving spaces – search engines are set up to read hyphens rather than underscores
For example
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/website-maintenance/ – good
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/website_maintenance/ – not good
Do not use CAPITAL LETTERS in URLs
Search engines and readers can be confused if you use capital letters in URLs – avoid using them and only use lower caser words
Try to use your target keyword in your URL
Google claim that using your target keyword in your URL is not a ranking factor – they claim a lot of things – however we would suggest that you do – it might not be a ranking factor but it will certainly help your audience and search engines to know what your web page is about,
For example which of the following is easier to comprehend?
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/website-design/
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/12345-6/
Avoid stuffing your URLs with keywords as this will be regarded as spam.
Avoid using a word twice in your URL – repletion is pointless and could be seen as a form of manipulation by the search engines – spam!
Use Clear URLs
Having clear clear URLs showing on search engine results pages can encourage searchers to click on the results more
Which one of the following URLS would you click on?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fire-tv-stick-lite
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07ZZW7QCM/ref=gw_uk_desk_mso_smp_shl_avs_c?pf_rd_r=YD8JJSSPV6N7YK8VRGD1&pf_rd_p=cb324cc9-b1ec-4694-8d9a-ef7d2547a13e&pd_rd_r=0657920d-598b-4016-bd51-7b034ab3a270&pd_rd_w=imtau&pd_rd_wg=agEnI&ref_=pd_gw_unk
Clear URLs encourage a better click through rate (CTR) – more visitors to your site – a higher CTA also suggests to Goole that you web page is relevant and popular, this might lead to Google to promote your web page up the rankings – you want that don’t you?
Optimize your URLs to give a clear and simple URL to make it easier for people to link to that page or tell others what the web pages URL is – you want people to link to and tell others about your web page, don’t you?
Use a consistent URL structure
There are 2 basic types of URLs – Static URLs which stay the same (as long as you do not change them in the HTML coding) and Dynamic URLs – such as the long, long, long amazon URL shown above – these change with variable parameters that change and add tracking codes – often done on eCommerce sites.
Avoid dynamic URLs if possible and opt for static URLs that can be read by visitors.
Avoid long URLs
Use short URLs, the shorter the better, as these tend to rank better on Google, and are easier to remember. Aim for a character length of about 50-60 characters.
Set a canonical URL on each webpage
A canonical URL is a preferred URL that you can set for your web page, to avoid any duplicate content problems.
Duplicate content problems? Duplicate content is where content on a web page appears elsewhere on the internet with a different URL. Duplicate content appears all over the internet, and although there is no such thing as a Google Duplicate Content penalty, Google does discourage it.
Duplicate content can appear on the same domain, and across multiple domains (people copy and paste your content on their sites!). You do not have much control over what is posted on other peoples domains (hello Mr Lawyer!) – but you can control it on your own domain.
Duplicated content can be produced by your content management system (CMS) such as WordPress on your own domain – automatically. This occurs when the web page can be reached via different URLs when you use categories and tags on your website.
For example – these 2 different URLs will lead to the same content:-
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/online-marketing/
https://www.jspwebdesign.co.uk/marketing/online-marketing/
Avoid using ‘stop’ words when optimizing your URLs
Stop words are words that tend to be ignored by search engines, they are words that often do not have a meaning by themselves, usually articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns etc such as
a
an
in
many
of
or
many
the
Optimize your URLs as these ‘empty’ words add no value to search engines and just use up valuable URL space, but as with all things SEO, if it makes more sense or easier for the user include them.
Avoid using special characters in URLs
Avoid using special characters such as question marks, apostrophes, exclamation points, ampersands, asterisks and blank spaces (hyphens are the standard and preferred method of separating words). Avoid these characters when naming image files as well.
In conclusion
The best ways to optimize your URLs for SEO is to keep them short, simple, readable, avoid special characters and include a keyword.
