The Perfect URL Structure for SEO! Best Practices For Improved Ranking

Key Takeaways

whether you're looking to improve a url structure for seo or you're building a brand new website and you're not quite sure how to structure the urls this guide is for you in the next few minutes you're going to learn the fundamentals for creating the perfect url structure for any website hey it's emily here from fat joe and i'm going to take you through the best practices that you need to follow when optimizing a url structure for search engines let's begin by looking at what a url is and why urls are so important a url also often referred to as a web address specifies the location of a resource on the internet and they serve many purposes sure they age your seo but they also provide additional benefits such as establishing and reinforcing trust having a clean url structure also maximizes the chances of users clicking and sharing your links it also helps users understand what they can expect when clicking on your link so let's look at how to fully optimize urls for search engines here are 10 tips to improve any url structure for seo one use hyphens to separate words when a url contains more than one word you have a few options in how you can separate them you could combine the phrase into one word use underscores or use hyphens now which of the three urls looks the cleanest and is the easiest to read most would say the last one no search engines will view url number one as a single word which is bad for keyword targeting and is hard for humans to read search engines don't recognize underscores as separators and will bunch the words together which makes this option bad for seo however when google sees a hyphen it will index each word separately they even say for themselves that hyphens are more useful to them than underscores two keep it short and sweet as a rule of thumb you should avoid creating urls with more than 60 characters it's likely that url is automatically generated from a page title whenever you create a new page on a website for example when we initially created our guide to link building the url looked like this so we trimmed the unnecessary parameters and made the url look like this shorter urls are more likely to get clicked and shared which is of course great for seo make sure though that urls don't cannibalize on any other pages for example we also have a link building service so we need to make it clear by this url that it's a guide rather than a product page three stop with the stop words a stop word is a commonly used word the and or it which search engines have been set to ignore stop words aren't indexed by google and including them will add unnecessary length to your url here's an example from wikihow there are a few stop words in this title because they're targeting the search term make a table it makes sense for them to remove all unnecessary words and focus primarily on the keyword 4. don't stuff urls adding a keyword multiple times in a url won't add any seo benefits and it can actually harm your ranking and click-through rate the keywords for your page should also be included in the page title meta description and throughout the content naturally five don't have too many folders a folder in this context refers to the number of forward slashes you use in your url we recommend that you limit the number of folders to a maximum of two let's take a look at an example the first url is short easy to read and tells us right away what we should expect the second has at least five folders that are visible and if it wasn't for the page title we would be unsure if we were going to see tennis rackets or a guide on how to choose one the url is also truncated which will impact how many people click through 6. say no to dynamic urls dynamic urls contain a query string which assigns values to specific parameters they're used by websites that use scripts and queries to talk to their content management system they're most commonly used by e-commerce businesses where products are going in and out of stock or prices are often changing so if you change anything within the cms the url will change too but dynamic urls provide absolutely no seo benefits and due to their structure they're less likely to be shared they're often long and full of random numbers letters and characters so unless absolutely necessary avoid using dynamic urls and use static urls instead seven merge similar pages together for larger websites it's very common to have multiple pages that are very similar in content and keywords if you keep them separate they'll just compete against each other in the serps so best seo practice is to merge these pages together using a 301 redirect to avoid losing any link or authority that the other page has this includes having a http and a https version of a web page they're considered two different pages by google so they should be canonicalized eight use a mobile sitemap google takes a mobile first approach to indexing websites so it'll take your mobile version of your website for indexing first when searching for the best creatine supplements on a mobile device the first two listings are accelerated mobile pages amp and the third is a mobile website from myprotein who have their own mobile sitemap very few businesses are using amp and mobile site maps so implementing this tip correctly means you could see a great boost in your mobile rankings 9. add a favicon a favicon is the little icon that appears on your web tab or bookmark adding a favorite onto your website doesn't have any direct seo benefits but it does add social proof and many forums and search engines like dot dot go will display it making it prominent on search a favicon is easy to set up and it gives you more real estate in search to make your listings pop include one on all your pages and your logo will appear on social media and forums when links are shared 10. stick to words and numbers adding any other character besides letters and numbers will make your url come across spammy and difficult to read our first thought of these characters is negative and it will impact click-through rates not only that but some characters don't work with certain browsers causing them to crash here's a chart of safe and unsafe characters for your reference but bear in mind that while the dollar sign plus exclamation mark and star are all considered safer urls most of these characters are considered spam by email servers and most internet users follow these best practices to optimize any url structure for better ranking and to establish and reinforce trust amongst both your users and search engines let us know the impact on your rankings in the comments we publish weekly seo and digital marketing tutorials so make sure to check out our channel and subscribe [Music]