Importance of URL Structure on a website
Posted on 27. Aug, 2009 by Jon Edward Santillan in SEO
I’m about to write a blog post about detailed SEO analysis but I am still thinking which industry should I focus on and which website should I choose, but while browsing different websites in the UAE, I’ve noticed that most website I looked at has a common mistake and this is a simple one, an issue of their URL structure. So… Instead of writing a SEO Analysis which I will do it hopefully early next week I decided to write The Importance of URL Structure on a website and here it goes.
In a nut shell, What is URL(Uniform Resource Locator)?
URL a term on the web that describes the unique address of a webpage in WWW (World Wide Web), it’s a commonly known as “Web Address”.
It is very important for a website to have a structured URL because this will help search engine spiders to index the website. A proper systematic and organize descriptive filenames and categories for the pages of your website will increase your site’s visibility in search engine by indexing all of the pages, can increase your the website traffic and of course a good rankings in search engine for any given keywords.
These mistakes are often overlooked by website developers. By not planning carefully their site’s architecture, they will end up with a random numbers, question marks, equals and other string parameter in their website URL. After that, once they discover that issue, they are looking for corrective after the website has been launch.
Imagine if you’ve read something and then after a few days you want to read it again which URL below would you prefer?
- http://www.mydomain.com/seo?ID =/20090827/Article/908269950/1138
- http://www.mydomain.com/seo/importance-of-url-structure
Will you still remember the first URL after few days? How would you know if the first URL given above is about “importance of URL structure”. You can’t right?!Because numbers are not easy to remember especially when other string are included like “?”, “=” and “/”
As opposed to the first URL, you can definitely remember the second URL in minute or even in seconds.
Here are some information that are most common issues that needs to be consider when constructing a URL of a website.
Keep it Systematic & Descriptive
Avoid using numbers as opposed to using descriptive and title of the content in the URL.The URL structure should be as simple as possible and constructed systematically as well as being comprehensible to users. That is using clear words rather than long parameters.
Optimize URL
If you’re targeting a keywords to rank in search engines like google, yahoo, bing and others. You need to consider optimizing your URL. Use the keywords that you want to target in your URL this will help search engine to index your web pages and clearly state which keyword that you are using by have the
Avoid Capital Letters
unlike a domain name, URL is case sensitive, so please… website developers don’t ever, ever allow any uppercase letters in your URL structure. Mixed cases can complicate and confuse.
WWW & non-WWW
As we all know that you can type your site with www or non www ex: ( http://www.mydomain.com or http://mydomain.com ) and you can see both same content of your website, but search engine treat this two separately. Search engine will choose one of them which is real depends on the inbound links and the other URL may not be counted and can be cost of your site be ban on the searching engines as it duplicates your website. The subject is also known as Canonical URL Issue in SEO industry.
To sum it up, even a website has best content; information must be reasonably organized for both search engine spiders and visitors to visit. It’s a bit pointless to put an effort in optimizing a Web page without giving users a simple access to that page’s content if they want to come back again. Badly constructed URL structures can constantly act as a stop sign to search engine indexing.
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