Your URLs provide an avenue to let search engines and people know what your page is about. Conversely, if you don't pay attention to your URLs, they may provide no value for your site's SEO (search engine optimization) or for your human visitors, either. Badly designed URLs may even trip up search engines or make them think you're spammy.
A keyword-infused URL can:
• Help visitors see that the page they're on is really what they're looking for. People will see your URL in search results, at the top of their web browser while they're on your page, and any place where they may save the URL for themselves.
A keyword-infused URL can:
• Help visitors see that the page they're on is really what they're looking for. People will see your URL in search results, at the top of their web browser while they're on your page, and any place where they may save the URL for themselves.
"If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credÃt." -Matt Cutts of Google
Keep your URLs to fewer than 115 characters.
• Research shows that people click on short URLs in search results twice as often as long ones. Shorter URLs are also easier to share on social sites like Twitter and StumbleUpon.
• Long URLs can look like spam. As the URL gets longer, the ranking weight given to each word in the URL gets spread thin, and becomes less valuable for any specific word.
Don't use more than a few query parameters in your URLs.
In a URL, a ? or & indicates that a parameter (like id=1234) will follow.
Here's an example of an okay URL
http://www.example.com/page?source=facebook
Bad URL with too many query parameters:
Bad URL with too many query parameters:
http://www.example.com/product?id=1234567&foo=abc123def&color=yellow&sort=price
Too many query parameters can cause search engine robots to enter a loop and keep crawling the same pages over and over again.
Too many query parameters can cause search engine robots to enter a loop and keep crawling the same pages over and over again.
Keep all of your important content less than 3 subfolders deep.
A subfolder is a folder that is visible in a URL between two slashes. For example, in http://www.example.com/articles/name-of-page, articles is a subfolder and name-of-page is an article in that subfolder.
When it comes to subfolders, search engines assume that content living many folders away from the root domain (like example.com) is less important. So it's best to organize all of your important content so each URL has no more than two subfolders.
Don't have too many subdomains.
A subdomain, or directory, is something that comes before the domain name in a URL. For example: http://blog.example.com.
Too many subdomains can cause problems for search engine optimization.
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I see that you copied and republished this article that I originally wrote on AboutUs.org... without permission, attribution, or the links that were in the original article. Not cool.
ReplyDeleteContact me at kristina [at] aboutus.org to discuss this. Or simply remove this post.