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If Your Website Address Doesn’t Make Sense to Human Users, Then It Won’t Make Sense to Search Engines Either

SEO Friendly URL

SEO URL Structure is important to know and has been a challenge even for SEO experts. But let’s back up first and talk about URLs themselves.

What is URL Structure?

A URL stands for a Uniform Resource Locator, but It’s commonly known as a website address. URLs tell search engines how to retrieve resources (most commonly websites) from their sources. The function of how they retrieve resources is called a Protocol and is expressed in the beginning of the URL as either http, https, or ftp, etc.

A URL is meant to be readable text that can also communicate with serves. That means it could be understood by both a person and server at the same time. A good URL also indicates the file structure of your website or identifies the path taken to get to that specific page.

http://www.example.com/services/explaining

In this example, we can see the page “explaining” is located under the “services” section of the website.

WHY IS SEO URL STRUCTURE IMPORTANT?

Proper URL structure is important for people and search engines alike. They provide an easy to read map to the destination and an idea of what the destination page will be about. If we go back to our example page above, we can see that the destination page will be providing us with information about “explaining”.

So even if the URL was the only information we had, we would still have a general idea of what we would find on that specific page. If you have a clearly defined structure to your website, your URLs should also be clear and easy to understand.

URLs themselves provide only a minor factor when search engines are determining your page’s search engine relevancy and rankings. Many people insert an abundance of keywords into their URLs to improve rankings. However, too many keywords in URLs just causes confusion, and will not positively impact your SEO.

The most important thing to keep in mind is clarity and conciseness. Using URLs that are simple, relevant, and accurate as possible is imperative for getting people and search engines to understand them. Once everyone understands what you are trying to achieve with your URL, you’ll be found faster and your users will have a better experience!

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SEO URL Best Practices

  • URLs should be concise
  • By seeing only the URL the user should have an idea of what to expect on the page
  • Use hyphens to separate words for readability
  • Use only lowercase letters
  • A mix of uppercase and lower case letters can cause duplicate content errors
  • URLs should be fewer than 2,048 characters

If you have further questions about SEO or want to make sure your website is optimized, talk to the Think Profits team today about how our monthly SEO services can get you to page 1 position 1!

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