URL Optimization Part 3: Page URLs

Why optimize page URLs?

Similar to page titles, page URLs can inform search engines and users about the content on the page. Simple, descriptive URLs are imperative to achieving our overall SEO success.

Creating the perfect URL for SEO

Here are some best practices for generating SEO-friendly page URLs:

Make URLs readable to humans

Static URLs are hard-coded and will remain the same for each page load. In contrast, some applications, such as e-commerce stores, and community forums may use dynamic URLs to deal with the frequent changes in the website.

Webmasters often avoid using dynamic URLs since they think search engines can’t cope with them. Google itself refutes such concerns [7]. Contrary to popular belief, Googlebot is equally capable of crawling and ranking all types of URLs.

That being said, static URLs can give us an edge in terms of click-through rates because they are human-readable. Dynamic URLs, characterized by parameters like &, ?, and +, seem foreign and unfriendly.

It’s obvious; we would rather click http://pupfood.com/adult-dry-dog-food and not http://pupfood.com/index.php?=5657253=t56=?p=783.

Outline our content

The page URL should be relevant to the content we have on that page. It should accurately and concisely describe the content of the page. Since the URL appears on the above page title on the SERPs, enticing and relevant URLs will benefit from higher click-through rates and a better user experience.

Optimize with keywords

Each webpage should ideally be optimized for one primary keyword. It’s a good idea to include this target keyword into the URL. It tells Google what search queries should the page show up for. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says that URLs that have words relevant to the page’s content are friendlier for visitors [8].

The same guide also warns against keyword stuffing. Excessive use of keywords can be taken as a signal for spam by search engines, damaging our site’s ranking.

For example, the URL http://pupfood.com/adult-dry-dog-food-dry-dog-food-food-for-dog-adult-dogfood is keyword-stuffed and looks spammy.

Shorter is better

Google recommends short URLs [9]. Shorter URLs are easier to read, understand, type and share. They’re also easy to work with over smaller screens, like phones or tablets. Many content management systems automatically generate the page URL from the title tag. However, page titles can sometimes be too long, with words like “and”, “is”, “the”, “that”. Stop words such as these are unnecessary for URLs and can be removed.

So if our page title says "What Human Food Is Safe To Feed Your Dog?", a suitable URL might be http://pupfood.com/human-food-safe-for-dog.

Hyphens for spaces

Separate words using hyphens. Avoid using underscores for the purpose. Search engines and users treat hyphens as spaces separating individual words, making it easier to read as compared to all the words fused together.

The URL http://pupfood.com/adult-dry-dog-food looks so much better than http://pupfood.com/adultdrydogfood.

Lowercase all the way

The domain name portion of the URL is case-insensitive. Whether we type Pupfood.com or pupfood.com, we’ll reach the same website.

Everything that comes after the root domain in the URL is case-sensitive. Google sees pupfood.com/adult-dry-food as a different page from pupfood.com/Adult-dry-food.

Uppercase URLs can result in 404 errors since users will often try to approach the page with lower case. If we have the same content on the upper and lower case versions of a URL, Google will see each one as a separate page. This is a situation where we are unknowingly creating duplicate content and hurting our site’s ranking.

If we have uppercase URLs for our website pages, both the above issues can be resolved by setting up 301 redirects, directing traffic to all-lowercase versions of the URLs.

Structure the website

For most purposes, subdirectories (also called subfolders, or categories) can offer greater SEO benefits as compared to subdomains. As already mentioned earlier in the lesson, search engines treat each subdomain as a separate entity and rank them individually. Unless we have a solid reason to make subdomains, categorize our website’s content into subfolders.

While creating categories, maintain a simple and intuitive structure for our site’s visitors. Too many subfolders can make navigation confusing for our visitors. Limit the number of subfolders to only what’s necessary for our site. Use short, logical names for the folders, easy enough for the visitors to establish connections between the different pages on the website.

For example, the URL pupfood.com/blog/adult-dry-dog-food is intuitive but pupfood.com/blog/adult-dog/food/dry-dog-food is not.

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