Be Careful with your URLs for better SEO
Your URL helps search engines and visitors understand your web page. Be serious about it. You become lax, and your SEO Campaign gets derailed. Worse, it may make the engines and users judge your website as spam.
So how do I ‘Prepare’ and ‘Prevent’, and ward off ‘Repair’ and ‘Repent’?
1. Put in some keywords in the URL. A keyword infused URL does many things. It helps visitors clearly identify the page they are on and what they look at. idslogic.com/blog/seo-services is always better than idslogic.com/blog/100505. People see the URL in search results, and often save it as a bookmark. It serves as a good indication. You just drop a hint through such a URL regarding the content and nature of your page.
2.Keep the count low, perhaps less than 115. This is reference to the number of characters in your URL. The shorter it is the better. With every additional word in your URL, the yawn becomes bigger and lengthier. The intent and interest wears out. People find it easier to share shorter URLs on sites like Twitter and StumbleUpon. Longer ones are reminiscent of spam.
3. Query Parameters look Impressive, but to a Certain Extent. Query parameters make your URL look technical and impressive too. But how many of them? An overload is poison for it. If you really want them in your URL, then this prototype should be your perfect guiding light: http://www.example.com/page?source=facebook
This would be disastrous http://www.example.com/product?id=1234567&foo=abc123def&color=yellow&sort=price
Too many of these confuse search engines spiders into entering a loop, and crawl the same pages over and over and over again. Some very important pages get ignored in this melee, which proves a great loss.
4. Try Hyphens, Forget Underscores. Underscores are seen as characters by search engines. When you put multiple ones between keywords, the whole thing is seen as one long keyword. IN the ordeal, you lose all SEO benefits. Hyphens play better substitute, they allow search engines to interpret your web pages better. Also, people find it tough to clearly see underscores in an underlined URL. Hyphens are easier to spot.
5. Important Content should be kept less than 3 subfolders deep.
What is a subfolder?
It is a folder visible in the URL between two slashes. In the URL http://www.example.com/articles/name-of-page, ‘articles’ is a subfolder and ‘name-of-page’ is an article within that subfolder. ‘example.com’ remains the root domain.
Search engines assume less importance is attributed to the content distant from the root domain. Organize in a way that your URL does not exceed two subfolders. You can also make sure your URL contains less than 3 slashes after the domain. Take this as benchmark, it is just perfect. http://www.example.com/articles/foo/page-name.htm
6. Never fancy numerous sub domains. The sub domain precedes the domain name in the URL. ‘www’ is the sub domain in the domain name, http://www.blog.example.com
Too many of these damage a good SEO campaign in progress.
These are a ‘must do’ if you want good productive SEO. Use them to ensure your website is optimized well and goes to the top.
Contributed by:
IDS Logic