The Best SEO Practices for URL Structure

Many web site owners fail to realize that the URL of an individual page can affect how much search engine traffic it receives. Like titles and keywords, URL structure is an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Read on to learn more about the best practices for creating an SEO based URL structure…

Putting related search keywords in the URL will help improve a page’s ranking. However, it is best to separate these words so that search engine “spiders” (a.k.a. “robots”) can distinguish between them; otherwise, it just looks like one long word. Some people use underscore (_) symbols in between the keywords, but using a hyphen (-) is generally considered preferable for SEO. If the page has content people are likely to revisit regularly – such as updated news or weather – consider creating a page with a short, easy to remember URL (perhaps a subdomain) which redirects to the long URL. Make sure the longer address is linked to from the “Site Map”.

Using a long URL structure generally isn’t a problem with regard to SEO; search engines will still index very long (over 100 letters) URLs, and most web browsers can handle addresses which are thousands of characters long. Nonetheless, excessively long URLs are less appealing for people to use in print or email. There is no need to repeat words already used in the URL; don’t use a word in the filename that repeats the domain, directory, or subdomain name. The same applies to the page’s title and “keywords” META tag, but not the body/text of the page, where SEO keywords should be used several times.

As an example of applying these best practices to the structure of a specific URL, the file name for a page selling portable computers might be cheap-laptop-notebook-computer. The entire address would be something like www.example.com/shopping/cheap-laptop-notebook-computer.htm. Changing the directory name “shopping” to “buy” would best target keywords people are likely to search for. On some search engines, text files (.TXT format) are listed with the URLs as their titles; others use the first line of text for this purpose. The same goes for documents in PDF format.

Basically, the best practices for creating an SEO oriented URL structure include using keywords (or phrases) people search for, separating each word with a hyphen, and avoiding repetitive URLs. Applying these practices isn’t difficult, and has the potential to substantially increase traffic.