The Perfect URL Structure for SEO! Best Practices For Improved Ranking

In the next few minutes, you’re going to learn the fundamentals of creating the perfect URL structure for your website.

Whether you’re looking to improve the URL structure of your website for SEO, or are building a new website and aren’t quite sure how you should structure your URLs, this guide is for YOU.

#URLstructure #seo #website

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// Why URL structure is so important

A URL, also often referred to as a web address, specifies the location of a resource on the internet and they serve many purposes.

Sure, they aid your SEO. But they also provide additional benefits such as establishing and reinforcing trust.

Having a clean URL structure also maximizes the chances of users clicking and sharing your links.

// 10 Tips to Improve Your URL Structure for SEO.

Here are our 10 tips to improve any URL structure for SEO.

1. Use hyphens to separate words

When a URL contains more than a single word, you have a few options in how you can separate them:

Combine the phrase into one word
Use underscores
Or use hyphens

2. Keep it Short and Sweet

As a rule of thumb, you should avoid creating URLs with more than 60 characters.

It’s likely that a URL is automatically generated from the page title whenever you create a new page on a website.

Shorter URLs are more likely to be clicked and shared which is, of course, great for SEO!

3. Stop With The Stop Words

A stop word is a commonly used word (the, and, or, it) which search engines have been set to ignore.

Stop words aren’t indexed by Google and including them will add unnecessary length.

4. Don’t Stuff URLs

Adding a keyword multiple times into your URL won’t offer any SEO benefits, and may even negatively impact your ranking and click through rate.

The keyword for your page should also be included in the page title, URL, and the meta description.

5. Don’t Have Too Many Folders

A folder in this context refers to the number of forward slashes you use within the URL. We recommend limiting folder use to a maximum of two.

6. Say NO to Dynamic URLs

Dynamic URLs contain a query string within the URL that assigns values to specific parameters.

They are most commonly used in e-commerce businesses where products are going in and out of stock or prices are changing. So if something changes within your CMS, so will the URL.

But Dynamic URLs provide absolutely no SEO benefit, and due to their structure they are less likely to be shared.

7. Merge Similar Pages Together

For larger websites, it’s common to have pages that are very similar in content and keywords.

If you keep them separate they will compete against each other in the SERPs, so best SEO practice is to merge them together using a 301 redirect to avoid losing any link authority the other page has.

8. Use a Mobile Sitemap

Google now takes a mobile-first approach to indexing websites, which means it will take the mobile version of your site for indexing first as more people search on mobile than desktop.

Very few businesses are using AMP and mobile sitemaps, so implementing this tip correctly could see your mobile rankings improve greatly.

9. Add a Favicon

A favicon is a little icon that appears on your web tab or bookmark.

Adding a favicon to your website doesn’t have any direct SEO benefit, but it adds social proof to your site and many forums and search engines like DuckDuckGo will display your favicon, making it more predominant on search.

10. Stick to Words and Numbers

Using any other character type besides letters and numbers comes across as negative and it’ll impact click-through rates.

Not only that but some characters don’t work with certain web browsers, causing them to crash.

// Follow these best practices to optimize any URL structure for better ranking and to establish and reinforce trust amongst both users and search engines.

Let us know the impact on your rankings in the comments.

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