How to Optimize Your URL’s for SEO

URL’s have long served a questionable role in SEO, with Google never truly acknowledging whether and to what degree they effect a site’s SEO. However, SEO’s have studied thousands upon thousands of URL’s and have compiled enough basic information that we will cover below.

First and foremost, it is paramount to maintain a simple structure that is readable by the common user as well. According to Google, “a site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible.” Remember, this is the semantic web so you want to use simple words and sentences that are easy to read and that anyone can understand. Once you go into the realm of massive URL’s with lots of nonsensical characters in a domain, then you’ve overshot and need to rein your URL in. Also, to improve readability, always be sure to use dashes when breaking up words in a URL.

Another important tip to keep in mind is to always use lower-cased letters. If you have identical URL’s where the only difference is some capitalization, then there is a good chance that those URL’s go different places. Also, it used to be that you shouldn’t use stop-words in URLs like “a” or “an,” but now you just need to make sure it is readable.

Finally, in writing out your URL, keep in mind that you don’t have to have an exact matching URL and in fact it helps to differentiate your URL’s, either by making them more readable or adding in keywords. And when you do insert keywords into your URL, be sure to place the most important ones at the start of the URL chain as that will signal to Google that those are your most important keywords.

Ultimately, you want people to click on your URL’s as much as you want Google to read them and to do so, writing sentence-like URL’s that have the essential keywords at front and use dashes in spacing words is the best way to ensure both.