SEO friendly URLs

By,
Parikshit

One of the most important factor in search engine optimization techniques is SEO-friendly URLs. A good structure can improve the indexation process of your website, but, unfortunately, there are large number of websites that use incorrect URLs. In this section we can take a look at the different elements of a URL and how we can we make a structure that will help us rank on top.

Elements in an URL:

A URL contains and should look very simple at first sight, but it actually contains several important pieces of information.

Let’s take a look at this example:

http://www.ziuby.com/blog/page-name

1.Hypertext Transfer Protocol: the most popular application protocol used on the website. Other protocols used in web applications are FTP and telnet.

2.Domain name on which website is present.

3.Subdirectories containing files.

4.File name of the requested resource

There are three parts of a URL that we can change or modify: the domain name, the subdirectories and the file names. In the following sections we’ll discuss each of these elements point wise and see how they can be changed.

Domain Name:

The domain name indicates your location on the internet. It’s main  part of a URL that is always reffered while visiting your site; often being used in emails, on business cards, etc.

A good domain name is always remembers to people. Hence it should be kept as short as possible, recomonded one or two words. This will not improve your rank higher, but it’s helpful for your visitors because it’s simpler to remember.

You might consider using keywords in a domain name. In days gone by keyword-rich domains were easy to rank because the ranking algorithms were less advanced.

Domain Extensions:

A .com domain is still the most famous domain extension. When we take a look at the availability in domain extensions on the search results page, we get about 87% are .com extension, 6% are .org and 3% are .net. Other extensions such as .info, .us, .ca... are popular in small amount.

Is domain extension plays role for SEO?

 A domain extension doesn’t matter whether or not we're dealing with a high quality site. There are other parameters that determine the quality, such as content and links.

On the other hand, a country-specific domain extension (such as .us, .de, .it...) can add some benefits. If you have a local business, let’s assume in India, it’s a good practice to buy a .in domain. Country specific domains don’t rank as well in other countries, but it can get you a quite much more amount of local traffic.

Subdirectories:

When we talk about subdirectories or subfolders, we can see like 2 parameters depth and width of these folders.

Depth:

Depth is the number of subfolders we find in a domain. This is usually reflected in the breadcrumbs.

Is subfolder structure can be too deep?

The flatter your site structure is, the better. Deep pages will often be crawled less frequently. It is good practice like to keep pages less than three folders deep.

Width:

Width stands for number of pages in a category. The width of a directory doesn’t affect rankings; you may have as many pages as you want. As long as the pages are unique, this doesn’t create a problem

Conclusion:

Using good URL structure is an SEO technique that has always given low priority. However, it can provide site a considerable boost.

That’s why you should keep keywords instead of any random words and numbers. Don’t use your subfolders too deep and use them over subdomains

If you want to split words, always use hyphens in your URL instead of underscores or plus-signs. And when it comes to dynamic URLs; Google can still read and index them.