Page URL is one of the important parts for SEO on-page optimization. There are many things to consider when creating page URL, like is it necessary to include category? Is URL needs to be as short as possible or is it okay to have few words on it? And how many keywords that need to included on URL? In reality, URL that SEO friendly is differs depend the type of website. Below you can find explanation on how to create SEO friendly URL.
There are 4 basic rule of creating SEO friendly URL that can be applying to any type of websites. The first rule is that URLs need to be focused. Like, you don’t need to include words like ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘of’ and etc. In most cases, these types of words didn’t add a value to page URL. If you can, remove verbs in your URLs and words like ‘have’, ‘are’, or ‘are’, if not needed, you need to remove them. To make anyone who sees your URL can easily know what the page is talking about.
There are no ground rules for the length of page URL. But it is recommended to create shortest URL as possible. Long URL is not a problem for Google, but once again shorter URL can attract more visitors, because they can easily know what the page that they click is talking about. Make sure that you’re using logical structure for URL, because Google will bolds the queries that match with words in your URL. The snippet in search engine results page showing that URL length is not an important issue, because Google is smart enough to show words that relevant/related to queries in URL. Avoid using underscore, because this symbol is not separating between words, in fact it will combine two words as one.
For creating SEO friendly URLs for company website, because this type of website stores company’s information and services, not much more beyond that. So, it’s recommended to use shortest URLs as possible. For example: http://company.com/about/ or http://company.com/about-us/. If you own an online shop, there are two methods that you can use. For example: http://shop.com/product-name/ or http://shop.com/category-name/product-name/. There are few CMS or content management systems, such as Magneto, that uses both of the methods. In this situation, you can use rel=”canonical”, to tell Google which one of the URL methods that you wanted it to appear on Google’s search result.
There are still question about what kind of URL structure to use. In this situation, SEO friendly URLs can play a part to make helpful URLs for visitor. If an online shop has categories to make it easy for visitors to browse the website, by all means include these categories in your URL as well. That means URL, breadcrumbs and menu will remind visitors where they are in the website. For example: http://shop.com/music/vinyl/ or http://shop.com/media/vinyl/. You need to decide for yourself if you think categories can add value to the product and URL. If you think so, then it’s also better for SEO to include the category, as category and product are related.
There are many methods for creating SEO friendly URL for blog or news website. Here are the options:
– http://website.com/post-title/ : Use this method if a website has a strong relation, you need to put focus on the title post and the title post is being used to create an SEO friendly URL. The relation will address the main topic to Google, so you don’t need to add that in the URL.
– http://website.com/category-name/post-title/ : If a website talking about many topics, then adding topic, as category, will make a clear understanding of what the page is talking about.
– http://website.com/mm/dd/yyy/post-title/ : This method is usually used by news website that publish many articles or pages every day. This method will show to visitors when is the article or news that they read was published. It’s recommended to use this method if the date really matters.
– http://website.com/post-title/three-digit-ID/ : This method only for news website that want to get included on Google News. Which in the technical guideline, it stated that to make sure that it only crawl news article, the news website need to make sure that their URLs are unique at least for 3 digits and are permanent. If your news website doesn’t want or need to add date in the URL, than you could add an ID for the post.
