Your URL, the name of your page in the browser address bar, is a great place to look for optimization opportunities. First and foremost, you should make sure that the URL makes it clear what the page is about – to your visitors AND the search engines. This short SEO URL optimization video walks you through the most common steps you can take to ensure that your URLs are working for you in your SEO efforts.
Video Transcription
Hello and welcome to Gnome Tips. Today we’ll talk about how to optimize your URLs for the search engines.
The URL is the name of your webpage as it is displayed in the browser’s address bar. There are several best practices related to URL construction that can really help your website rank higher in the organic search results.
Here are a couple of examples of bad URLs. Let’s take a closer look and figure out how to do some URL optimization.
A URL with a bunch of numbers is not helpful to anybody. Make sure the URLs have meaning to humans AND search engines.
The dash is the only character that is universally recognized as as space. Use a dash to separate words rather than underscores or plus signs.
The URL is a great place to highlight your keyword phrase. This helps the search engine (and your visitor) understand what the page is all about.
Here are some additional things to keep in mind when constructing URLs:
- Don’t use query strings. Rather, use session variables, which don’t show up in the URL.
- Static (vs. dynamic) URLs are best.
- Make sure each page has only one unique URL. Be careful with content management systems that try to create all sorts of archives, which creates duplicate content.
- Short URLs are preferable.
- Please note that if you are going to change existing URLs, you need to 301 redirect your old URL to your new URL so you don’t lose traffic.
Thanks for watching this edition of Gnome Tips. For more information about search engine optimization, visit our website at www.webgnomes.org.
Very userful information. Thanks!
Free SEO Audit pdf is great 😉
I’m really glad you enjoyed the post and the free audit 🙂 Thanks for commenting!
Short URLs are preferable.
When you say preferable from the statement above, it is means that using short URLs is not mandatory..??? Just better..??
What happen if we use the long URL especially in term of search engine ranking…???
Hi Zainal,
Short URLs are not “mandatory,” but you shouldn’t use an unnecessarily long URL.
From a search engine ranking perspective, your URL plays a role in on-page optimization. Ideally, you’ll include your targeted keyword in the URL and avoid stop words. All of the advice in this post’s video is still applicable today 🙂
Thanks for the comment!