Having the same keyword in your URL more than once won’t do you any good. Make sure you aren’t filling yours with any unnecessary words or characters, and avoid keyword stuffing. Stick to the main categories that are important for making your website more intuitive in its organization, and be as consistent as possible in the URL structure you use across the site. Determine what categories and subcategories you’ll be using and how you’ll portray them in the URLs of web pages that belong in each category.īe careful not to let things get too complicated here – too many categories will bog down your URLs and make them confusing rather than helpful: is an intuitive URL structure, while is taking things too far.

Follow a standard URL structure.Īs discussed above, this will relate to your website’s overall organization and is an important rule to follow. The first and most important thing you need to do for your website’s URLs is to simply commit to customizing each one based on what’s on the web page. That’s skipping a big SEO opportunity, while also creating a more confusing experience for your visitors. Always edit a page’s URL to be relevant.Ī surprising number of websites will still use automatically generated URLs that look like a string of gibberish. Here are a few good ways to make sure you use your URLs wisely. The URL is a pretty basic part of on-site optimization, but one that it’s important to get right. That gives Google just a little bit more information to make sure it understands what’s on the page and knows what keywords the page should show up in search for. The search engine crawler can more easily make the relevant connections between different pages on your website – it can see that a particular item belongs in the same category as other dresses (even if “dress” isn’t in the product name), which belong in the larger category of women’s clothes on the site – information that helps the crawler better understand what different sections of the website are about and how they relate to each other.Īs an added benefit, having those extra categories precede the specific keyword or product name in your URL adds in some extra relevant keywords without creating a URL that’s spammy.

And lastly, the same thing that makes a good URL structure intuitive for users is good for search engines too.

Savvy web users also know they can delete the last couple of parts of the URL (dresses/nameofspecificdress) to get back to the larger selection of women’s clothes. If someone browsing a retail website for clothes finds themselves on the page they know the page belongs in the two categories that precede the final part of the html: women’s clothes and dresses.

Next, an intuitive URL structure makes your site easier to navigate for users.

The URL is one of the most important parts of the page Google looks at to determine what a page is about.

First, for Google to consistently deliver relevant results to searchers, it has to know what each page in its index is about.

Your URL structure matters for a few key reasons. For example, the URL for a post on your blog should look something like this: At a glance to the URL, any visitor who reached the post through an outside link would quickly be able to see that they’re on a blog, as well some basic information about the specific blog post on the page. You want your URLs to both reference what’s on the specific page, as well as help situate the website visitor to where this page belongs on the larger website. Your URL structure will directly relate to your larger site architecture. ), so what you want to define is what follows for individual pages. Your URLs always start with the root domain for your website (e.g. (If your website is already established and growing, it’s not too late to do this now, it just might require more work.) Working example of output here.In the early stages of starting a website, you want to sit down and figure out a standard structure for your website URLs.

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You can cut/paste the script below replacing all of the contents that were put in by default.

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