The URL of a website may not seem important to a layman, but for a marketer and a business owner it carries more useful information than a business name only. The link structure focuses the communication of business name, products, and services, folders and categories in a presentable manner to enhance search engine exposure and reach the targeted audience. To restructure URLs for higher SEO rankings and human readability, you can take benefit of the following useful tips.
- Use real life words
Make the URLs human readable with the usage of real life words. Relieve your customers in scanning the URL with easy words rather than the confusing abbreviations and jargons. With this, you can easily make the URLs memorable of the end consumers.
- Remove IDs and numbers
The default structure of a URL often includes IDs, numbers and special characters which create hurdles for search robots in reading the URLs and stop customers in trusting your website. You need to remove them before promoting it.
- Canonicalize multiple links
Multiple links that are directing to the content may penalize your website in search engine. To stay on the safe side and pursue higher rankings, you can canonicalize them HTML tags.
- Insert keywords
Inserting keywords in URLs helps the search engines and users in knowing what the web page is about. You can add the relevant keywords to the link address and try to avoid its excessive use.
- Consistency between Page title and URL
Retain a consistency between the page title and URL is the most recommended technique, as a title with an unmatched URL misleads consumers and may stop them from trusting you.
- Skip stop words in the URL
In the titles of the web pages, there are not restrictions to use stop words, but should not be included in the URL structure. It may cause the search robots to scan the link address in the phrase that do not make sense.
- Have fewer folders
Folders in the URL represent product classification and attributes. A link more than expected folders gives the impression of an extensive categorization of products. It may look confusing, so better keep it to a limited number of folders.
- Hyphens are the preferred word separators
Adding a phrase without space to the URL does not make sense that’s why for segregating the words we use hyphens and underscores, as these are the preferred ones. Most of the marketers give more value to the use of hyphens rather than underscores.
- Set fair redirections
The purpose of redirection is to help customers find an alternate page, but it shall never be used for unfair traffic growth and page impressions. Set redirections where necessary and avoid it using a loop.
- Combine www with the non-www version
The www and non-www versions are shown different in search results. You need to merge them by setting a redirection from one version to another.
You can optimize the URLs with the above useful tips as improving the URL structure makes your link address more readable and memorable, whereas it directly impacts the SEO rankings of your business as well.
Now check here infographic for structuring urls.
Infographic by http://www.fmemodules.com/
