SEO Silverado Services

How to Optimize Page URL

Sunday, 05. 15. 2011  –  Category: On-Page Optimization, SEO Process

The main reason URL should be optimized is to make a site get high rankings in search engine to increase traffic freely. Another reason is to make it readable to people so it can more likely get clicked.

Here are some guidelines in having an SEO-friendly URL structure:

1. URL structure of a website ought to be very simple. When deciding a URL, you should first organize your content so it would be constructed in a logical manner that is most understandable to humans. Make it as readable as possible instead of using long ID numbers. The URL of a site may influence the user to whether or not click the link. The more readable it is, the more likely will a person click on that link.
2. Use punctuations in your URL. To separate multiple keywords in URL consider using hyphens instead of underscores.
3. When URL structure is complex crawlers will have difficulty causing them to create unnecessary high numbers of URL that directs to identical content on your site. When this happens, your site might not get indexed by search engines.

Additional Guidelines:

1. Use static URL instead of a dynamic one. This is because dynamic URL contents are not friendly to indexing. Search engines will have a long time in indexing. Another reason is that dynamic URL is not readable so click through rate in search engine results is decreased.
2. Limit the length of words in your URL as search engines tend to limit crawling if the URL has too many keywords in it. Ideally, keywords should be less than 10 as search engines favor short and descriptive URLs.
3. Do not change your URL structure. This is why it is important to have your URL well-structured from the beginning so you can keep it stable and unchanged. But in case you need to alter it, it is best if you redirect the old to the new so as to make sure that search engines will transfer your link juice and page ranking from the old to the new without affecting your site.
4. Only have keywords placed in your URL. Do away with numbers and words like the, of, you and the likes.
5. Use a single version of URL to access your web page since having more than one will be taken as duplicate content by search engines.
6. Limit the number of subfolder in your URL.

Do not overlook making your URL structure optimized as it can affect your search engine rankings more than you think it can.

Tags: Correct Page URL, Google-friendly URL, optimized URL, SEO-Friendly URL structure, URL construction