In this part, we will let you know why we consider search-friendly URL’s are a must. Using SEO-friendly URLs will always help in gaining search engine ranking and allows you to share these SEF URLs easily with anyone.
Also, keep in mind the visitors that are going to arrive at your site while setting up your URL structure. As there are different types of websites, the SEO-friendly URL will be different for each of the websites.
To note, an inferior URL structure is always a common SEO issue, that can lead to a weaken or damage your rankings and keep the pages out of the search engine rankings.
This may also lead to a low in rankings of your other website pages or the complete website.
We will discuss some basic rules that need to consider for the URLs –
We should always go with the smaller URLs. Also keep in mind to use a logical structure in your URL, as Google bolds these keywords used in the search even in the URL. So always keep the URLs short and their content should be focused.
Always try using a single domain or a subdomain for your blogs. Also, if the subdomain is the only way you can set your blog or produce the content you need, then it’s better than nothing.
But your blog is far more likely to perform well in the rankings and to help the rest of the content of your site to perform well if it’s all together in one sub and root domain.
Readability can be a subjective topic but the below snapshot can help us understand. You can see that a well-structured URL is always an eye-catcher for the searchers.
We should never use underscores as they combine the words and make them up as one. We should always remember to separate the words using dashes.
Also, consider not using spaces as they are rendered awkwardly in URLs as %20. This reduces the readability of your web pages.
If a user or a crawler requests URL A, which redirects to URL B. It’s fine. It’s okay if URL B then redirects to URL C(More ideal would be to point URL A to directly to URL C). However if the redirect string continues past two hops, you can get into trouble.
Generally speaking, search engines will follow these longer redirect jumps, but they’ve recommended against the practice in the past, and for less “important” URLs (in their eyes), they may not follow or count the ranking signals of the redirecting URLs as completely.
The bigger trouble is browsers and users, who are both slowed down and sometimes even stymied (mobile browsers, in particular, can occasionally struggle with this) by longer redirect strings. Keep redirects to a minimum and you’ll set yourself up for lesser problems.
Have a look at the below URL –
http://example.com/watches/casio/chronograph-edition/black/casio-edifice
Now, consider structuring it like below –
https://example.com/casio/casio-edifice
Using folders will never harm the performance, but can create a perception of site depth to both the search engines and the searchers. There is no hard and fast rule for this but you can use your best judgment for these.
Always remember that the best SEO-friendly URLs differ per type of website. let us discuss the types of websites that can arise –
If a website is holding the information about the company and or/services then that’s it. We can make use of the shorter URLs as shown below in the example –
https://example.com/contact
https://example.com/about-us
If your website is a webshop then there are two ways we can choose from –
https://exapmle.com/product-name
https://example.com/category-name/product-name
If your website is a blog or a news website, then there are a number of ways to create your URLs –
https://example.com/post-title
https://example.com/category-name/post-title
https://example.com/mm/dd/yyyy/post-title
https://example.com/post-title/three-digit-id
In the next article, we will discuss – How to create SEO-friendly URLs?