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. In our time building, rebuilding, and SEOing websites we have seen some crazy URL’s that defy basic logic. Below you will find the 5 rule we follow when creating a website’s URLs. We structure the URLs to help users and search engines understand your website in a more accurate way.
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.
Example:
www.yoursite.com/category/subcategory/productpage/product might be shortened to www.yoursite.com/product
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 something like www.yoursite.com/leashes/blue-dog-leashes
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
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
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
