SEO Tutorials: URL Optimization

If you are having a new business or you are going for a new website or only a few pages of your site are developed and no SEO work is done … then, kindly consider going for a domain name that defines your business.

So, what’s in a name?

Let’s say, you are David Sheldon a tax consultant wanting to take your consulting business online with your own website. Then don’t go for the domain name “davidsheldon.com” unless and until a million people already know you out there. Go with a domain name that defines your business … like ProTaxConsulting.com or TaxConsultant.com. Because if I were to look for a tax consultant, I would use the term ‘tax consultant’ with Google or Yahoo. Having the keyword in your domain name would ease to a great extent for your website to get a rank for the term that is most important for your business … driving you traffic and new business all year round.

URL Structure

1) A site's URL structure should be as simple as possible. For example, if you're searching for information about aviation, a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1, is much less appealing to users.

Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

2) Broken relative links. Broken relative links can often cause infinite spaces. Frequently, this problem arises because of repeated path elements. For example:

http://www.example.com/index.shtml/discuss/category/school/061121/html/interview/

category/health/070223/html/category/business/070302/html/category/community/070413/html/FAQ.htm

3) Length of the URL: no more than 3-5 words in your URL. If there are more than 5 words then Google algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit. Here is one more evidence in favor of short URL: recent research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones. So by sticking to short URLs you get both better rankings and better clickthrough.

4) Dashes are better than underscores. Although Google has no individual preferences (meaning you won’t be penalizes for either of the versions), dashes are more preferable as Google sees each hyphened word as an individual one:

So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2?

5) URL is case sensitive meaning that if by any reason (your choice or CMS) you stick to a an upper-case version, remember that this can cause a few issues: people are most likely to link to the standard lower case one and you might both lose link juice and suffer from duplicate content issues.

6) Moving to static URL structure my favorite tactic is to use 301 redirect only for most powerful (in terms of linking and traffic) pages and leave all others to be handled via 404.

7) If you hesitate if your URLs may be perceived as spammy, check out SEOMOZ URL Spam Detection Tool that will estimate: