What is Search Engine Optimization? It’s the practice of making sure your website’s content and technical code are set up in such a way that it makes it easy for search engines like Google to find, crawl, index, and rank your site appropriately. In this SEO best practices guide, we’ll walk you through the steps of creating SEO-friendly URL structure, which will help your pages appear high in search results with keywords you choose (called on-page SEO). At the end of this article, you’ll know how to optimize your URLs to achieve better rankings.
The anatomy of a good URL
When constructing a URL, use our alphabetical ordering convention to create an easy-to-remember URL that is optimized for search engines. While it’s important to keep some organizational aspects of your website with your URLs, like navigation menus and high-level page structure, it’s also vital to make sure that search engines can easily find and crawl all of your content.
SEO best practices for URLs
An SEO-friendly URL structure has two primary goals: 1) to get a search engine spider to find and understand all of your web pages and 2) to tell users and search engines what exactly they’ll find on each page. Both of these goals can be accomplished by keeping URLs as simple as possible, without any unnecessary words, numbers or codes that don’t serve either purpose. Consider these SEO best practices for URLs when optimizing for search engines.
SEO friendly home page URL
Every site should have a homepage that is optimized for search engines. This page is often considered to be the face of your company, so it’s important to make sure that it is as easy as possible for search engines to crawl and index.
SEO friendly category URLs
All your category URLs should be SEO friendly, or as close to SEO friendly as possible. You can easily do that by making sure all of your category URLs are short and have a little keyword density in them. Say you have a weight loss category with posts in it.
SEO friendly product URLs
Although SEO-friendly URLs are not as important to search engine ranking as they used to be, they can still have a positive impact on your search engine rankings. These best practices will help you create SEO-friendly URLs and optimize them for maximum impact.
SEO friendly blog posts URLs
Creating an SEO friendly URL structure can be a challenging task for some website owners. Whether you’re on WordPress, or another CMS platform, it’s important to make sure your URLs are search engine optimized so that they are easily indexed by search engines. Some of best practices you should follow include using keywords in post titles and posts URLs, naming pages after keywords and using other SEO-friendly URL structures.
Avoiding 404s and redirects in the structure
All of your URLs should work; make sure you have set up redirects in case a page is no longer on your site or has moved to a new location. It’s also important that all of your pages are indexed by search engines, so avoid using URLs with query strings or special characters (don’t forget to remove these from links you post online). When possible, include keywords in your URLs—just don’t be spammy about it.