Welcome to our guide on URL structure best practices for SEO! We’re here to help you craft a well-optimized and organized URL structure that will help improve your website’s search engine visibility and overall user experience.
In this short guide, we will walk you through the essential elements and strategies for creating SEO-friendly URLs that can help boost your SEO digital marketing efforts.
1. Keep the URL Descriptive and Relevant
When crafting your URLs, the goal should be to give users, search engines, and crawlers a very clear idea of the content/purpose of the page. It might seem like work that isn’t necessary, but if you continue not to emphasize being descriptive and relevant, the more negative impact you’ll see.
- Bad Example: www.example.com/blog/article123
- Good Example: www.example.com/blog/seo-friendly-url-structure
2. Use Keywords Wisely
Keywords are still an important piece of an SEO strategy, and that also includes your URLs. Like you normally do, have a primary keyword that truly reflects the main topic of the page you’re working o,n and do your best to work it into the URL.
Please, please, please, do not keyword stuff. That practice is long gone, and even if you try to do that while working on your URL structure, it won’t help. Keep the main goal the main goal, which is making the URL readable and meaningful to users, search engines, and crawlers.
Note: The beginning of the URL holds more weight for SEO than the end of the URL too.
3. Maintain URL Consistency
The more you can keep consistency in your URL structure, the easier it is for search engines and crawlers to understand/navigate your site, and users can better know which pages have similar information.
With that in mind, how you start is important. If you start with a case of our bad example above, it’ll be more work later on to go back and change all of your URLs. Consistency is more impactful when you do it from the start.
Note: They don’t have to be exactly the same, but overall consistent. See how our services all have /services/, but the slug after that isn’t exactly the same idea.
4. Keep the URL Short and Sweet
The longer your URL, the harder it is for users to remember it and the less clean it looks. Having too many parameters in your URL is a knock on your overall SEO for that page, not to mention it looks pretty bad and will get cut off in search engine results. More is not always better.
5. Avoid Dynamic Parameters
Dynamic parameters, such as numbers or special characters, can make URLs look messy and less informative. Choose static URLs that provide clear information about the content.
Dynamic parameters are things such as numbers, special characters, underscores, etc., and these not only look pretty awful in URLs but also normally make it less informative. You can certainly use numbers, like a blog that is talking about the 5 best burgers in Milwaukee, but it might be more advantageous to just use /best-burgers-milwaukee/; it’ll save you the headache of 301s if you decide to rewrite that blog later.
- Bad Example: www.example.com/product?id=123&category=5
- Good Example: www.example.com/product/blue-widget
6. Don’t Use Underscores
When separating words in your URL, use hyphens (-) over underscores (_) or run-on words. Search engines treat hyphens as word separators, making it easier to distinguish between individual words.
7. Exclude Stop Words
As much as you might want to have your URL be a complete sentence or grammar-friendly, stop words like “and,” “the,” “in,” etc., don’t contribute significantly to the meaning of a URL and can make it longer. Take them out to help create cleaner and more concise URLs.
8. Be Mindful of Capitalization
URLs are case-insensitive, but it’s a good practice to use only lowercase letters to maintain consistency and avoid confusion. Mixed-case URLs can lead to duplicate content issues.
This goes back to all the grammar advocates out there… Even if you’re using a city like Milwaukee in your URL, please push to not capitalize it. I know it might not “look great” to you, but it will to everyone else.
9. Understand www versus non-www
While it doesn’t matter whether you use www or not in front of your domain name, it is very important to understand that they are different. Search engines view these two URLs as different URLs, “www.example.com” and “example.com”.
Now, when working on your URL structure after the fact, this comes into play less. Your “default” (www or non-www) will be included on your pages, blogs, and other URLs.
10. Trailing Slashes in URLs
The same goes for the trailing slash at the end of URLs. It does not matter if you do or don’t have them, but they should be consistent because search engines view these two URLs as different URLs, “example.com/” and “example.com”.
11. Implement Canonicalization
Canonical tags are essential for SEO as they indicate the preferred version of a URL when there are duplicate or similar pages. This prevents search engines from indexing multiple versions of the same content.
As tedious as manually changing some of these might be, it’ll help improve those URLs’ performance by giving crawlers the exact version of the page. We use Yoast to manually input canonicals since it’s an easy and quick way to do it.
12. Leverage Subfolders for Organization
Subfolders are a great way to organize and categorize content logically. Think of them as folders for your paperwork (if people still have actual paperwork these days…). If you have a folder for your service URLs, it is easy to find them rather than looking in one folder that contains every page, blog, resource, and whatever you’ve ever posted.
This is exactly how crawlers and users think. If I’m looking for a service page, I should be able to go to the service folder and sort through it. NOT have to look through hundreds of blog URLs.
13. Redirect Old URLs
PLEASE make sure you are setting up 301 redirects for old URLs or URLs you are changing. This is something we consistently see missed when overhauling a website or doing a complete redesign.
There are a few major things that you’ll lose out on if you don’t:
- Your current SEO page authority (value). Without a redirect, that authority will go nowhere, and all that history and work done will vanish.
- Users. If you have broken links out there and they are trying to get to your site, most users will just leave the instant they see that 404 page.
- Credibility. This one might be more our opinion, but if you have a ton of broken links out there, it’s hard for users to see you as a credible source when they can’t even get to the page they are trying to get to.
There are plenty of tools to monitor this, but Google Search Console is a good start!
14. Avoid Overusing Categories
While subfolders can help with organization, avoid creating excessive levels of subdirectories. A shallow, focused URL structure is preferred to keep URLs concise and understandable.
By implementing these best practices for URL structure, you can enhance the SEO performance of your websites. An optimized URL structure not only contributes to better search engine rankings but also improves the overall user experience, leading to increased traffic and engagement… which we’re all looking for.
Need Help Managing Your Website?
SocialSurge offers website hosting, discounted premium licenses, regular site updates, and website support in an affordable package. Explore SocialSurge Web Design services.