URLs can significantly impact a website's performance in areas like SEO, branding, content, search, and user experience. URLs should include targeted keywords relevant to a business's products and services separated by dashes. They should also make the page content easily understandable from the URL alone. While changing domains can hurt SEO, optimizing URLs during a website redesign can improve SEO rankings by creating URLs that are intuitive, organized, simple and help search engines understand the page content.
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Do URLs Really Matter For SEO
1. Do URLs Really
Matter ForSEO?
POSTED BY
MARGARET M.
WHITSON
02.16.15 - SEO
Does anyone even
remember what URL
stands for? I had to think about it for a minute. The acronym has become such a
standard in our conversations like ISP and WWW. URL stands for Uniform
Resource Locator and is an entire set of directions, containing extremely detailed
information contains which points to the IP address. The IP address is the
numerical label assigned to each device that uses the internet protocol for
communications. Ok, enough with the nerdiness. Thanks for playing SEO trivia.
But seriously, URLs are so much more than a location address and can have a
significant effect on how well your website performs. A great URL will touch on
several aspects of digital marketing: Branding, SEO, Content, Search, and User
Experience. So it is important to consider them when designing or redesigning
your website.
Branding – Your URL contains your domain, that middle part of the URL between
the ‘www’ or ‘http://’ and the ‘.com, .net, or .org’. Most businesses have their
name or some version of it as their domain, like Nike.com, coca-cola.com or
Fusionfarm.com. This is the first thing a searcher will see when visiting a website.
SEO – Your URL should contain targeted and relevant keywords relevant to your
products and services. Use dashes between words within your URL. Dashes are
recognized as separators on Google. If you use underscores, Google will
recognize them as connectors. Review Fusionfarm.com/marketing_strategy vs
Fusionfarm.com/marketing-strategy for example. Dashes are like setting your
2. phrase to broad match modifier. This means the two words will be searched for
together, but in any order. Underscores are setting the words at phrase match, in
effect searching for ‘marketing strategy’ as one word.
If you have a separate page for each location of your business, and you should,
be sure to include the location of that business in the URL. This will give a boost
to the SEO ranking of that location.
Content – Search engines prefer URLs that make it easy to understand what
your page content is all about. Compare:
http://www.clothing.com/Mens-Hats/b?ie=UTF8&node=2474954011
to http://www.clothing.com/Mens-Hats/sale/black/small
Long strings of numbers or characters are not readable content. Users should be
able to read the URL and have a very good idea of what to expect on that page.
Which URL tells you more about what is on that page? While the former may be
how your URL is rendered when first created, you can and should modify it to
look more like the latter when completing your technical SEO.
User Experience - Keep the structure organized and simple for a good user
experience. The way a user navigates the site should be intuitive. Utilize folders
and subfolders for organization and flow. SEO best practices recommend only
having only a few levels of navigation. Nothing should be more than a few clicks
into a website.
If you have a long URL, consider a vanity URL. The core function of a vanity URL
is meant to help simplify a complicated URL. Again, this also goes back to
branding. A shorter URL is easier to remember. A vanity URL redirects to the
longer URL. Vanity URLs do not rank for SEO but they are easier to remember.
I would caution about changing a domain, especially one you have had for more
than a year. Even if you utilize 301 redirects, the new domain is like starting over
when building your web presence.
3. URLs are like resumes –they have history, experience and relevance behind
them. The better your website’s resume, the higher the SEO ranking and
visibility. If you are redesigning a website, this is the perfect opportunity to
improve the structure and SEO of the URLs.