URL, acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, is one of the key concepts of the web. It is important to locate a resource on the worldwide web. In colloquial terms, it is known as web address. (For example, www.searchgnext.com) While this is one of the building blocks of a website, it also plays a role in its search engine visibility. You can enhance your website’s search engine ranking and visibility by optimizing your URLs accordingly. Therefore, we have curated a list of some best yet simple tips to create SEO-friendly URLs.
It may come as a surprise to some, but yes, URLs can play a role in search engine optimization. A well-crafted URL has many benefits to offer. Although not as big, but URL is a ranking factor. It helps humans and search engine bots to understand what a page is about. Moreover, SEO optimized URLs can serve as their own anchor text when copy pasted as link over any platform on the internet.
URLs are ‘basically’ divided into 3 parts-
Protocol
Domain name
Path
Although, a URL can be divided into 5 parts but for this article, we’ll focus on these 3.
SEO-friendly URLs alone can’t help your website achieve search engine higher rankings but it can add to your efforts. And who knows, it might just act as that little push your site needed. So, let’s talk about the ways you can create SEO-friendly URLs.
Top 5 best yet simple ways to optimize URLs for search engines
1. Create a descriptive URL
Creating a descriptive URL implies using a word or a combination of it which gives the best idea about your website’s content. However, if you are creating a website for your business, your domain name should be the name of your company.
A human-readable domain name helps users get an idea of what your page is about. Moreover, such an adequately descriptive URL can act as an anchor text itself when copy-pasted on some online forum, discussion forum, blog, social media platform, or any other internet platform. Therefore, it is important to write a domain name that gives an accurate guess about your website’s content.
For example, there’s a digital marketing agency in Bangalore which uses URL https://www.curvearro.com/in/locations/bangalore/
This is a good example of a descriptive URL. It makes it clear that the agency is located in Bangalore. Hence, it would also make a great anchor text in the context as well.
Not only that, but a descriptive URL can also help Google index your website according to a query that employs similar terms as your URL.
2. Use keywords
Keywords are the cornerstone of search engine optimization. These are the terms and phrases that help people find your website through search engines. Competition in digital marketing is becoming insanely tight. Hence, webmasters and marketers try to optimize anything and everything possible for search engine visibility. URL is one such element.
Placing keywords in your written content, titles, alt tags, meta tags, descriptions etc. is good and all. But it’s not enough if you want to stay ahead in the game. Therefore, webmasters should also optimize their URLs by doing effective keywords placing.
However, it is important to keep in mind that you don’t overdo keywords. Or else, you could get your website penalized by search engines.
Moreover, as I have already mentioned: though they can greatly help polish up your SEO model, URLs in isolation are not a very significant ranking factor. Therefore, if you don’t have an otherwise sound SEO program, you may just end up with a URL stuffed with unyielding keywords.
3. Create short URLs
Along with the descriptive quality of your URL and effective keyword placement, its length is another important factor. It is crucial to be as brief as possible when creating an URL.
For search engines, long URLs leave the impression of keywords stuffing. And as I have already mentioned, keywords stuffing is something search engines don’t like. It’s pretty much how it works with content marketing. Quality over keywords. Hence, long URLs can lead to penalisation by search engine. And you definitely don’t want that.
Moreover, the lesser words, the more focus and value search engine spider will give to each word. Therefore, webmasters should stick to shorter URLs when optimizing for search engines.
4. Keep it simple
This is another important thing to be kept in mind while creating a URL for your website. The simpler it is the better. Therefore, your website’s URL should be relevant, descriptive, charged with keywords, short and yet, simple.
A complex URL can be intimidating, discouraging, and hard to remember. On the other hand, a simplified URL is easy to remember and encouraging to click on. So, make sure to employ simple language terms in your URL to optimize it for SEO.
There’s also another thing that webmasters should keep in mind. You should write your URL in lowercase only. This makes it further easy to read and remember a URL. At the same time, if your URL contains a mix of uppercase and lowercase alphabet, it gets difficult to read, understand, or remember it.
So, stick to simple and lowercase words to get the best out of your URLs.
5. Make it enticing
Last in the list but still very crucial URL writing practice, your webpage URLs should be enticing. This implies that when a person sees your website’s URL on SERPs or posted on some other internet platforms, he/she should feel compelled to click on it.
To get high click-through-rates, it is important that your URL gets clicked on. And, it’s the probability of being clicked depends upon how enticing or tempting it is. If you follow the above practices effectively (descriptive, short, simple URL), you will be easily able to come up with something people would like to click upon. So, for rule number 5, make your URL enticing.
Conclusion
Usually undermined, URLs can play a considerable role in search engine marketing. By keeping your URLs descriptive, keywords charged, short, simple, and enticing, you can improve your website’s ranking. Moreover, it helps improve your CTR rate. However, optimizing URLs in isolation can’t help you achieve your SEO goals. It is an add-on effort and should be treated as such.
