Day 13: Well Written URL structure

Let us first understand what a URL really means. URL stands for uniform resource locator. It acts as a reference to your webpage. Url is displayed in the address bar of the browser as a web address. A URL is made of a protocol, domain name, and path. Its general format is:

protocol://domain-name.top-level-domain/path    

URL serve important purposes for SEO:
1. A well-defined URL structure helps the users in knowing what might be there on the web page. Include words in your URL that might indicate a little of the page content. This way it will be easy for the user to locate what he might be looking for. Even if the page title of the web page is hidden, the user can still get an idea of what is the page all about.
2. URL serves as a little but important factor in the web page ranking. Use of keywords in the URL may result in getting the page crawled by Google. URL with a keyword helps in increasing the site visibility.
3. These might serve as their own links. On placing these well-written URLs on any external website along with some content, the user might likely want to click on it taking him to your page.

Keep your urls simple yet relevant. This way both search engines and users can understand it. Avoid using any number in the url. For separating words, use hyphens instead of underscore, space or any other character. Avoid using capital letters in a URL.

Tips for writing an SEO friendly url:
1. Keywords are the main point of focus to get ranking on Google. Use them to the fullest. Using them can help you in two ways. Firstly, the user can get a clear idea what is there on the web page.

Secondly, urls will serve as an anchor text when there is no anchor text defined for the link. So a clear url will help the users.
2. Keep in mind the length of your url. 50-60 characters are sufficient for the url word limit. Short urls are more user-friendly since the user can easily read or copy paste them. Longer url become difficult to read.
3. Use the Canonical Tag. It helps in telling the browser that the page is a copy of some other page. This helps when 2 or more pages have duplicate content. You have to put the tag in the HTML tag of the page that has the duplicate content.
5. Try to keep the page title and url same as far as possible. If not exactly the same, trying putting in similar words or variations of the page title.
6. Think of the future pages you might add to your website before deciding any url. You might have to add any new folder or page.
7. Avoid the use of words like and, because, or, the, etc. These not only increase your url length but also is unnecessary. Limit your words only up to the ones that help the user understand what is there in the web page.
8. Make XML Sitemap for your website. It acts as a map for the search engines of your website. It contains a list of all the urls or your website.

Now that you are clear with an SEO Friendly url structure, we will next discuss blogs and other content pages in our next article.