One of the important factors that affect SEO ranking is URL Structure. Because whenever a search engine crawler comes to your website they first look at the URL of the website.
URL -Uniform Resource Locator
Search crawlers easily understand the good URL and index the URL in the search engine server. A good URL structure is very important for both the user who is visiting your website and Search Engine, this is something that might not seem so obvious, but it is in fact, something Search engine likes google and bing takes very seriously. Because a bad URL gives a bad signal to the Search crawlers and its looks fishy and user think it’s very wired while using the website, is it hacking something? or is it a genuine website to surf?
So it is very necessary to have a proper url structure to rank higher in search engine. There are a few things that you should consider in your URL when you’re creating pages.
- Easy to read
- Include a Keyword
- Minimum Redirects
- Consistency
- Sitemap
- Easy to read
First and foremost the URL should be easy to read. What a lot of platforms end up doing is they give you plain URLs that look something like this:
“http://www.techcode.co.uk/?p=123432”
This is very messy, both the user and Google will have trouble understanding what the page is about. Not only this but having a clear URL structure allows for people to use it as anchor text and know exactly what your page is going to contain. For example, say someone on was writing an article and was going to include one of your pages for people to refer to and the article read:
“you can find more information here http://www.techcode.co.uk/title/?ref=2017820475”
Of course, looking at this you know it’s going to be something related to the dog grooming site but it could be any to do with it whatsoever. However, if that URL instead said something like this
“You can find more information here http://www.techcode.co.uk/title/seo-tips”
You can instantly tell what the page is going to be about and so can Google. This brings us to the next point
- Include a Keyword
The URL of any page should have words that represent what the page is about. For example, if you have a page talking all about driving lessons in London, then a suitable URL would be something like this: ‘http://www.examplesite.com/driving-lessons-london’. It’s straight to the point letting you know exactly what kind of contents are going to be found on the page. You can check the blog name generator.
- Minimum Redirects
What you want with any website is the least amount of redirects possible. There are a lot of sites out there that have all sorts of temporary redirects set up causing the site to run slower and create a serious amount of confusion. As per team cheapandbesthosting.com, Redirects are necessary when you need to move things around and don’t want to lose any of your ranking power but these need to be permanent redirects. Unless you are going to be using the old URL again then you shouldn’t be creating temporary ones.
Another mistake people make is creating a redirect on a page that is already a redirect itself which causes unnecessary loops. When Google sees this they will notice that they are being passed around from page to page and start to question the reliability of it. Try and keep your linking structure as simple as possible.
- Consistency
There are a few different ways you can structure your URLs, the important thing is no matter which one you choose to do, it’s consistent throughout your whole site. So for example, if you choose to show just the name of your page in all lower case, make sure every single page on your site follows this and doesn’t have a few pages in numeric format for instance.
- Sitemap
Every site that you do SEO on will benefit from having a sitemap. This is something in the backend of the website that helps search engines bots see all of your pages in the one place. Most good sitemaps will also automatically add any new pages that you create so that you don’t miss any important information.
