{"id":1347,"date":"2016-10-24T13:45:23","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T13:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginewatch.com\/2016\/10\/24\/seo-best-practice-guide-for-urls\/"},"modified":"2019-09-12T17:36:53","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T17:36:53","slug":"seo-best-practice-guide-for-urls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2016\/10\/24\/seo-best-practice-guide-for-urls\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO best practice guide for URLs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today we\u2019re going to take a look at the basic building block of not just SEO<\/a>, but your very web presence itself: the humble URL.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Does the structure of a URL (or uniform resource locator for pointless trivia fans) matter to SEO? Yes it does, in fact there are many best practices you should consider when creating a URL for your content.<\/p>\n

1) Keep a simple, readable structure<\/h2>\n

This is Google\u2019s number one most important advice – \u201ca site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

It should be logical and readable for human beings. So you\u2019re URL should be www.example.com\/SEO-advice-for-beginners<\/strong> not www.example.com\/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=4j3898enno0223bns983201djis03<\/strong><\/p>\n

Use actual words and sentences that anyone can understand, especially when copied into other documents or emails. Stay away from eternally long random patterns of letters and numbers. Nobody wants to click on that.<\/p>\n

Gov.UK recommends it should be as short, memorable and unambiguous as possible, especially if a URL is going to be referred to offline.<\/p>\n

2) Use hyphens to break up words in a URL<\/h2>\n

Punctuation is key in promoting readability in URLs. Google recommends hyphens (www.example.com\/SEO-advice-for-beginners<\/strong>) instead of underscores (_).<\/p>\n

3) All URLs must be in lower case<\/h2>\n

If your URL contains upper case letters, redirect to the lower case version. In some cases (if you\u2019re hosting with Linux\/Unix servers) identical URLs where the sole difference is a capital letter –\u00a0example.com\/webpage<\/strong> versus example.com\/webPage<\/strong>\u00a0– can be considered different pages.<\/p>\n

4) Stop-words in URLs<\/h2>\n

It used to be that you were recommended to avoid stop words (a, an, the) in URLs, but that doesn\u2019t matter anymore. A URL just needs to make sense to human eyes.<\/p>\n

5) Your headline doesn\u2019t have to match the URL exactly<\/h2>\n

In fact it\u2019s a good idea to vary the text, and make it more concise. If your headline says \u201925 super-useful SEO<\/a> best practice tips for beginners\u2019 it may be useful to pair it with a simpler URL: 25-SEO-best-practice-tips-for-beginners<\/p>\n

6) Make sure your keywords are near the front of a URL<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s still good SEO<\/a> practice to ensure a page\u2019s keywords<\/a> are near the front of a URL – but it still needs to be readable AND not stuffed with keywords.<\/p>\n

7) Use a single domain or subdomain<\/h2>\n

According to Moz, \u201ca company blog is far more likely to perform well in the rankings and to help the rest of your site’s content perform well if it’s all together on one sub and root domain.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s apparently plenty of evidence to suggest that when a company moves content from a subdomain to a subfolder, they see a positive boost in search visibility in traffic.<\/p>\n

8) The fewer folders (slashes) the better<\/h2>\n

Again, according to Moz, the more slashes your URL has, won\u2019t necessarily harm your performance, but it can create an illusion of depth and make indexing your content more complex.<\/p>\n

9) URLS should be the verb stem<\/h2>\n

As recommended by Gov.uk – you should use the term \u2018apply\u2019 rather than \u2018applying\u2019 for instance.<\/p>\n

10) Avoid high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content<\/h2>\n

Overly complex URLs with multiple parameters (such as in point number one) can cause problems for Googlebots<\/a>, by creating too many different URLs containing similar content.<\/p>\n

Google provides a huge list of how this problem can be created in its guide as mentioned in my introduction. It includes:<\/p>\n