Improve the structure of your URLs

The first part of our course is achieved and contain an introduction followed by some SEO Fundamentals (Title Meta Tag and Description Meta tag ). This section is reserved to another issue through which we'll explain how to improve a website's structure via the structure of URLs and making the website easier to navigate.

Simple-to-understand URLs will convey content information easily

Making illustrative categories and file-names for the documents on your website help you not only to keep your webpage much better organized, but it could also help you to better crawl your documents by search engines like Google and Bing (exploration of websites by search engine software in order to index their content). In addition, it may build simply "friendlier" URLs for anyone trying in order to link to your articles. Website visitors could be intimidated by very extended and cryptic URLs which contain few recognizable words.

URLs can be confusing and unfriendly (see the example bellow). Users would have a hard time reciting the URL from memory or even building a link to it. Furthermore, users may perhaps think that a portion of the URL will be needless, particularly when the URL displays many unrecognizable parameters (Data provided in the URL to specify a site's behavior). They might leave off a part, breaking the link.

Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.

 URLs are displayed in search results

Finally, remember that your URL to your document can be shown as a part of a research in search engines, under your page's title and snippet. Like the title and snippet, words within the URL on the research result appear in bold if they appear in the user's query (see the example bellow). Bellow is  another  example  showing  a  URL  on  a  domain  for  a  page containing an article about the rarest baseball cards. The words in the URL might appeal to a search user more than an ID number like "www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/10 1 5/" would.

Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible  for  both  users  and  search  engines  can  help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we'd like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site. To learn even more about good URL structure, we  recommend  this  Webmaster  Help  Center  page  on creating Google-friendly URLs.

Best practices

Use words in URLs:
URLs with words that are relevant to your website's content or articles and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.

Avoid:

• using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
• choosing generic page names like "page1.html"
• using excessive keywords like"baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm"

Create a simple directory structure:

Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.

Avoid:

• having deep nesting of subdirectories like ".../dir1/dir /dir /dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html"
• using directory names that have no relation to the content in them

This is all for the first part in this section. See you next time with the second part which titled 'Make your site easier to navigate'.