Top Tips to Optimize Your URLs For SEO
Ever thought that URL structure matters a lot?
Yes, it does. It is very important to optimize URL structure for better performance in search engines and traffic. As an Top SEO agency, we understand the significance of this. There will be some questions in your mind related to this topic, and I am going to explain them to you in this article.
Whenever you search for anything on Google, you will only get a clean and easy-to-understand URL at the top of Google. For instance, here are the results I got when I searched for content marketing on Google.
You can see these are very simple and short. Even anyone can remember them very quickly. The reason behind their ranking is their URL structures. I am not saying that anyone can’t rank for any keyword without having a good URL structure, but it is taken into consideration when ranking any website on Google.
How to optimize your URLs?
By this heading, I want to tell you to keep your URL structure as easy as possible. As we saw in the image above, URL structures are very simple, and people can remember them very quickly.
If your URL can’t be remembered by people, you are going wrong. You should improve it. You can do that by following these tips while setting up the URL structure of your articles or your site. You will never like to Use Dynamic URL structures. They will not give users a good experience.
Dynamic URLs are the URLs that contain symbols like “#,” “?”,”+,” =,” and more within it. They are used to navigate throughout the page if the page is more extensive. In WordPress, If you do not set up a URL structure, It will assign the default URL structure of WordPress, which is Dynamic.
Here is an example of dynamic URLs that are not user-friendly or human-friendly.
As you can see, these URLs are not human-friendly, and if the person isn’t techy, he/she can’t remember them. Instead, Check the URL structures below,
In comparison with dynamic URLs, static URLs are very easy to remember and are human-friendly. Yes, In some cases, you need Dynamic URLs, and they also get indexed in Google, but they are not good when it comes to User Experience.
2. Using keywords in the URL
You would like to use keywords in your URLs because they will help you get better search engine rankings. Whether it is a Dynamic URL or a simple URL, you can get a better rank in search engines by using keywords.
It is always good to put keywords in URLs. For example, if the main keyword has Backlinks for the personal blog, then your URL can be http://www.yoursite.com/backlinks-for-personal-blog to make it look better and easy to remember. Moreover, you will rank higher in search engines because you have an exact match keyword in the URL.
I’ve many articles on my blog ranking in the same way. One more thing you need to care about is delimiters. It is always recommended to use “-” as a delimiter to separate keywords in an article. If there is no delimiter between keywords in the URL, then it is very hard to read and remember. Here is an example:
http://www.domain.com/backlinksforlongtermblog – Hard to read and remember.
http://wwww.domain.com/backlinks-for-long-term-blog – Very easy to read and remember.
So, now you know that simple URLs and keywords rock the rankings. There is much more to know about URL structures; let us continue the most important part.
If your URLs are very long, then you have to take care of the length of them. This is because Google doesn’t display whole URLs in SERPs; you need to shorten your URLs to make the URL show as a whole URL in SERPs.
So, the optimal length for the URL to get better results is 40-60 characters, including your domain. So, trim up your extra characters and Slugs from your URLs and make them as short as possible. Use keywords to make it more SEO-friendly.
Here is an example of the Perfect URL.
Home page –> http://www.domain.com
Article page –> http://www.domain.com/article-keywords
Category and tag pages –> http://www.domain.com/category-or-tag
Similarly, you can put static and simple User-friendly URL structures for every page on your blog or site to get better results.
Nowadays, Google wants to give users a perfect page in which they can solve their questions without messing up anything. So, Google will only show simple and trustworthy pages to users. If your URL structure is better, you will rank higher.
URL structures matter a lot when it comes to user experience and search engine performance. If users remember it, there is a higher chance that they will come to your site again to gain more knowledge from your blog or site.
Search engines consider URL structure, and there are some cases in which any site ranks in the #1 spot without having the same keyword in the whole content but only once in the URL. So, We can’t underestimate URL structure.
If many URLs provide the same content, then you can use a Canonical tag to avoid plagiarism. So, these are some rules you need to know when it comes to optimizing URL structure.
