So your creating a new site, or thinking about rewriting your URLs to help your users and the search engines understand your website and its pages more accurately. URLs are important when it comes to indexation, marketing, click through, and when other sites link to your website. They should be optimized to pass keyword metrics and help with click through. This is where SEO comes in; to define the URL structure and get the most value out of it. When new URLs are being planned for sites, the following rules should be followed and a SEO should be brought in to work with your business to define the structure.
Rules To Follow When Creating a Website’s URLs
Rule 1. Keep it short
While a descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing slashes will make your URLs easier to copy, paste, or remember in the rare case they were not bookmarked, and will be fully visible in the search results. Should be no more than 100 characters with stop-words removed
Example:
www.yoursite.com/category/subcategory/productpage/product might be shortened to www.yoursite.com/product
Rule 2. Use Keywords Your Trying To Target With the Page (don’t over do it, remember #1)
If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don’t go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for SEO purposes; overuse will result in less usable URLs and can trip spam filters.
Example:
www.yoursite.com/dog-leashes-that-are-blue/blue-dog-leashes might be more focused to www.yoursite.com/leashes/blue-dog-leashes
Rule 3. Choose descriptive URLs whenever possible and remove special characters
Rather than selecting numbers or meaningless figures to categorize information, use real words and remove any special characters.
Example:
www.yoursite.com/category/item?23434 should be rewritten to be www.yoursite.com/category/dog-leashes
www.yoursite.com/category/john’s-leashes should be rewritten to be www.yoursite.com/category/johns-leashes
Rule 4. Use hyphens to separate words
Not all of the search engines interpret separators accurately like “_”, “+”, or “%20” so use the hyphen “-” character to separate words in a URL.
Example:
www.yoursite.com/category/dog+leashes should be rewritten to be www.yoursite.com/category/dog-leashes
Rule 5. Keep It Lowercase
Not all the search engines are case sensitive so www.yoursite.com/dog and www.yoursite.com/Dog can be seen as different URLs by some of the search engines.
Example:
www.yoursite.com/category/Johns-Leashes should be rewritten to be www.yoursite.com/category/johns-leashes
Rule 6: Remove stop words (from page name)
Example:
www.yoursite.com/category1/the-page-and-dog-name becomes www.yoursite.com/category1/page-dog-name
Rule 7: Should be no more than 1 level deep
Level 1 should be the site section.
Example:
www.yoursite.com/category1/page-name (Good)
www.yoursite.com/category1/category2/page-name (Not optimal, but in some cases it’s necessary)
Rule 8: Tracking perimeters should be removed from internal URL’s
Tracking should be done with onclick events if you use Omniture.
To learn more about the value that URLs have on the SEO variables please head over to our resource that talks about these values.
Bill is the Lead Linchpin at the company and focuses on SEO and content strategy. Bill’s ten-year background in digital marketing, SEO, and building online companies has helped him rise to strategic lead for some of the largest online brands and content websites in the world. Bill believes that at the core of a website's success sits the value that website provides it users.
Click here to learn more about LinchpinSEO's Lead Linchpin.
