What if you give your home address to someone, and they can’t make sense of it? They wouldn’t be able to reach your place even until eternity! Similarly, how can you expect search engines and users to access your website with that sloppy and chaotic URL, which is the address to find your website and web pages?
While accomplishing SEO optimization of a page or site, website owners tend to focus ridiculously on the content, backlinking, image optimization, mobile-friendliness, etc. However, URL structure never gains that prominence in the SEO checklist, which is not good at all to overlook. This may factor in dropping your ranks in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). While SEO-friendly URLs facilitate in improving site rankings, thereby driving more quality traffic to the page.
Although there is still no unanimous say on whether the rankings are affected by URL structure. However, one needs to grasp that improper URL structure is detrimental to the SERP ranks of a page, as it makes it difficult for users and search engines to understand what your site is all about.
Users ask, “Does URL name affect SEO?” Well, it does! But how? Read on to know!
A URL that features a proper structure with pertinent keywords enjoys more favor amongst the users as well as search engines. A decently structured URL allows more ease to the readers, who can then decide if the page is relevant to answer their query or not. This way, a site promises a great user experience and gets more clickthrough rates which further play a role in ranking the site in search results. However, this isn’t applicable for mobile users who cannot notice the URL in SERPs.
A chic-looking URL that contains keywords in balanced proportion offers more context and information to search engines to figure out what your site is all about than a messy one. Furthermore, if anyone wants to link your content to theirs, a proper and friendly URL will cheer them up, increasing backlinks for your site and, thus, its authority. This directly impacts the SEO of your site since the more outbound links your site enjoys, the higher your site’s traffic goes.
You have got the answer to does URL impacts SEO. Now, recognizing the importance of creating clean URLs is not enough, and you need to put the knowledge into action. And for that, you need some actionable and effective practices to make the most of it. Here, we have laid down URL best practices you need to follow.
“Are long URLs bad for SEO?”, “What should I do to create the aptest URL structure?”. Now we hear you ask as you have learned the significance of the said in enhancing site rankings, boosting the SEO, and so forth. Here are the best practices you can follow to forge effective URLs that garner quality traffic to your web pages:
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which implies that it informs you about a certain content’s address available on the web. A URL typically has four parts: protocol, domain name, subdirectories, and particular page name.
Now you know the best strategies to create URL structure and why it is important for SEO. It’s the moment to see what a good URL actually looks like. An appropriate URL is clean, short, and sweet and is about 35-45 characters in length. And it should be scribed in lowercase letters only to avoid duplication problems, must have hyphens instead of underscores, and must be keyword rich (not spammy).
With all these attributes in mind, a good URL would appear as follows, while we have added a bad URL example to clarify things further.
SEO-friendly URL example: letterbox.com/english-post-for-children
Bad URL structure example: http://www.sample.com/space%20here.html
With these examples, your concept of good and bad URLs should get clear. You can work on producing fruitful URLs for your content instead of relying on jumbled, automatically generated ones.
Mistakes are an inevitable part of doing something. However, you must try your best to avoid making blunders that can lead you into a fiasco — for instance, forging grim URLs that ultimately land one in a trap of infinite 301 redirects.
Now that you know how important is URL for SEO, do long URLs affect SEO, do vanity URLs impact SEO, and other related common queries, it is time to get to some work? But, to succeed in the game, while knowing the best practices of making URLs, you should be conscious of the mistakes that people typically make. It will ensure that you do not commit any foul-up that could prove detrimental to your website.
So, here goes a helpful list of common URL mistakes and how to avoid them:
Although there is a substantial body of conflict around the importance of clean and consistent URLs for SEO, keeping neat URLs is a hallmark of credible businesses. It does impact the success and ranking of a site in some way or the other. So, do endeavor to spare some minutes to create custom SEO-friendly URLs to gain the favor of search engines and users. The technique definitely pays off in the long run!
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