SEO Friendly urls
In our modern digital world, your business website is one of your most important, if not the most important, tools-of-the-trade for making your products and/or services known to your target audience.

Therefore, ensuring your website can be easily found online is crucial for the success of your business – and this is where search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a significant role. One of the most basic elements of SEO is your website’s URL.

But first, what’s a URL?

A URL or Uniform Resource Locator is human-readable text that replaces the numbers (IP addresses) that computers use to communicate with servers. A URL consists of the following:

    • 1. Protocol – the web standard for the protocol is HTTP:// or Https://.
    • 2. Domain name – is the human-readable name of the specific location where the website is located.
    • 3. Path, which includes the specific folder and sub-folder structure of where a page is located.

Benefits of SEO-friendly URLs

When you’re creating your website, it’s important to create a URL structure that will make both the search engines (your digital visitors) and your human visitors happy. URLs that clearly describe your page content, are short enough to make your pages easy to remember and share, and make sense of your site navigation are some of the ways to make all visitors to your website happy.

Let’s take a look at some of the elements for creating SEO-friendly URLs that will help your website rank as high as possible.

9 tips for creating SEO-friendly URLs

1. Go with HTTPS

Online security is a major concern these days and Internet users want to know that they’re using a secure connection, especially if they’re also providing personal or financial details to purchase things via your website.

So, when it comes to the protocol of your URL, go with HTTPS rather than HTTP. HTTPS stands for “HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure,” which is the secure version of HTTP. Information on an HTTPS website is encrypted, which significantly increases security and puts your visitors at ease, which will result in more visitors and a corresponding increase in attention from the search engines.

2. Choose a top-level domain name

Your website’s domain name is the specific location where it’s hosted. If possible, go with a ‘top-level domain’ or TLD – you’re most likely familiar with .com and other TLDs like .edu for educational sites, .gov for governmental sites and so on.

Having a top-level domain name is the one really important thing from the viewpoint of your human visitors – it makes them more likely to trust your site. That’s import t, because search engines pick up on whether or not people trust your website – the greater the level of human trust, the more they will visit, resulting in a greater level of interest by the search engines.

3. Limit the number of folders

Folders and sub-folders are indicated by the slashes you see between text in a URL. Your website’s architecture and the way you structure your folders makes a difference to how visitors and search engines navigate your site. A good rule of thumb is to try to have your most important content within two clicks of your home page.

The Proper folder structure is important – for example, www.yourwebsite.com/concretepaverproducts/ would be better structured as www.yourwebsite.com/products/concretepavers/. This way you are ‘nesting’ the pages correctly and logically, and you’re also giving the visitor the ability to always know where they are located on your website.

Again, the key here is to keep your folders simple – use as few slashes or folders as possible in your URLs (try to limit yourself to two). Not only does this make your URL easier on the eye of your human visitor, it also makes it easier for a search engine to decipher what’s going on in your website.

4. Ensure your URL is readable

It should come as no surprise that good SEO and user-friendliness go hand in hand. The easier humans can read a URL, the better it is for search engines too. The search engines leverage user data to determine with what people are engaging or not. So, when creating your URL, be sure its human-friendly – something simple and clear that can be easily understood at a glance.

5. Keep it short and simple

When it comes to SEO-friendly URLs, the best rule is to keep it as short and simple as possible – as long as the URL still gives a visitor a clear and accurate idea of what they can expect to find when they click on the link. If you want an even more specific guideline, aim for around 60 characters. If you cannot give a visitor to your website a clear idea of what to expect in 60 characters, then something’s wrong.

In addition to being easier to understand, shorter URLs are also easier to memorise, copy and paste, read to someone over the phone, or share on social media – and anything that improves the sharing of your URL is worth the effort.

6 Include keywords

Creating a good URL is all about usability – if it’s good for visitors, it’s good for search engines. That’s why you want to use keywords in your URLs, instead of random words and numbers. Use one or two of the keywords you’re targeting for rankings. This lets people who see your URL know what they’re going to get. Keywords in the URL also show up in search results, which helps searchers decided whether to click or not.

Of course, you shouldn’t stuff your URLs with keywords – you wouldn’t do that in your content so neither would you want to do that in your URLs. Limit yourself to one or two meaningful keywords.

7 If you must separate words, use hyphens

Search engines pay attention to punctuation marks in URLs to ensure that the results they deliver are in the same context as what the user has typed into the search box. If you want to separate words in your URL, use hyphens instead of underscores, plus-signs or spaces. Using underscore indicates to search engines something different than when you use a dash. And spaces render awkwardly in URLs as %20, which detracts from the readability for users.

8 Use lowercase letters

Always use lowercase letters because capitals have an effect on the way search engines index your pages. If your URL has capital letters and a user shares a lowercase version, it could result in a 404 error, indicating that the page was not found

9 Avoid including file extensions in URLs

Having file extensions like .html, .php or .asp at the end of your URLs might not have an effect on how search engines rank your pages, but there are still good reasons to avoid including them. Firstly, they also don’t ‘read’ well for the human visitor and make it difficult for them to remember your URL. Secondly, there’s the matter of security – the more information that you make available about how your website is built, the greater the chance of some malicious user working out how to hack it.

In summary – keep it simple

A well-crafted URL gives both humans and search engines an easy-to-understand indication of what the destination page will be about – and anything that makes it clear what a visitor will see if they click a link improves their user experience.

Basically, creating SEO-friendly URLs comes down to three common-sense principles, namely: keep it short, simple and readable. If you base the creation of your URLs on these three principles, then you’ll be fine.

Need help with creating SEO-friendly URLs for your website? Talk to the SEO experts at Auckland digital marketing agency Net Branding. We’re just a phone call or click away – so get in touch with us today.