8/2/2011
URL Structure for SEO Best Practices
URL Structure Best Practices
Content management systems have become one of the most popular mediums for website construction in recent history. CMS’s usually assign dynamic URLs for web pages, which takes away from the SEO value. Dynamic URLs usually show a series of numbers and symbols rather than words. If properly constructed, search engines will read the words in a URL as a keyword rather than skipping it over. Try running a few URL’s through the SEOmoz URL Spam Detection Algorithm to find out if the URLs are being read as spam by search engines. If so, follow this guide to remedy the problem.
Dashes vs. Underscores in URLs:
Implanting keywords into URLs can hold great SEO value if done correctly. Most static URLs separate words by either dashes or underscores, but which of the two performs better? The correct answer is dashes. When words in a URL are separated by an underscore, spiders will only read one of words in a search unless the user searches with underscores. If separated by dashes, the spider will read all keywords separately or as one keyword phrase.
Ex: www.website.com/internet_marketing_agency.aspx
www.website.com/internet-marketing-agency.aspx
Length and Capitalization of URLs:
Length and capitalization of a URL will also directly affect how Google indexes the website. If-A-Url-is-Ridiculously-Long-Like-This, the words will lose a lot of their SEO value. Limit URLs to three to five words maximum. Also remember to never use capital letters in a URL. URLs are case sensitive, and most inbound links will use all lower case letters – which will weaken the link if your URL is not lower case letters.
Canonical Issues in URLs:
Should I be displaying the www or showing index pages? What is the proper way to display the URL for a homepage? A lot of websites have four different URL options just for the homepage.
A) http://www.website.com
B) http://www.website.com/index.php
C) http://website.com
D) http://website.com/index.php
Having these four options is confusing to viewers and search engines. Keep it clean and simple. Option A is the best of the four. This style allows for the best indexing results, and is less confusing to link partners. When a website has all four options, some people may link to A, some to B, and some to D. This will greatly drop the SEO value of back-links. To fix the problem, set up a 301 redirect pointing from B, C, and D to style A. Doing this will help restore a lot of the link value and help Google index the website better.
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11 Responses to URL Structure for SEO Best Practices
While I agree primarily with the recommendations, there are a couple finer points.
Dashes vs. Underscores – highly recommend dashes, however Google has gotten much better at figuring this out. In the past, it wasn’t necessarily the first word, but an exact phrase including the underscore. Why? Because programmers might be searching for function names that were written this way. I’d definitely use dashes for any new sites, but I’d caution before switching over an older site’s URLs just for this.
Canonical URLs – “A” may not necessarily be the best choice, though most times it will be a safe choice. Rather, check inbound links to determine if one method has been used more consistently, which will probably be the “www” version. But if it isn’t, then I might choose the “non-www” version to further reinforce the dominant version.
And absolutely, setup the 301′s to the dominant version.
In the end though, there isn’t a lot that can be done about the inbound links…people link they way they want to link. The biggest thing a site owner can do to strengthen their canonical URL signals is to consistently link across their own site and other properties.
With that in mind, I’d actually recommend including the trailing slash as it will be added by the server anyway. Biggest issue though tends to be linking to the root domain in some places, and a file version (e.g., index.php, home.aspx, etc.) and appending tracking parameters (e.g., for footer, logo, main nav, etc.).
Harrison, thanks for the explanation on the www. vs no www. I think my 301 is working, learning to do SEO from scratch is a huge pain in the cpanel.
I would love to request a follow-up blog post from you on the top 10 or top 20 things a newb should do in the first 90 days of starting a new site. I am afraid of building back links too fast, I get emails daily about guys that will build 10,000 links in 10 minutes, and now telemarketers promising to get me on the 1st page of google. How fast is too fast?
Hi David,
I’m glad you enjoyed my post. I could probably put together a post about SEO for a new website in the future.
My advice to you is to stay away from those link brokers that claim thousands of links in minutes. Most of them are scams. Even if they do what they claim to do, the links they will provide you with will all be spammy, and most likely discounted by search engines anyway.
There’s really no guideline to how fast you should or shouldn’t build links. Just make sure the links you do acquire are of high value and relevant.
A great website for starter SEO information would be SEOmoz’s blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog. You can also check out Search Engine Journal – which I occasionally write for at http://www.searchenginejournal.com.
i have a very specific question about URL’s for product pages. I have set all unique url’s using keywords that best describe the product. Do you recommend this for ecommerce sites that sell many different sizes and styles of the same product?
This must be very confusing to bloggers especially for the new ones. Google or other search engines should update their crawlers to detect that those 4 structures are the same.
Great posting,really Search engine optimization has a great future and in in a good demand in the market.So everybody should be properly work with it.
mary greenwell fragrance
I knew most of the on page factors but i was always in dilemma whether to use Underscore or Dashes in the URL..This post helped me a lot.seriously very very useful tips.
Gr8 Post !
Hi Harrison,
Can you help me a little bit with the 301 redirects.
I use self hosted WordPress as my blogging platform. In the general settings, I have set http://www.domain.com as default format. All inbound links point to http://www.domain.com too.
What else should I do?
Grtz
Albert
Albert,
WordPress automatically takes care of canonical URLs for you. If someone reaches the front page by some URL other than what your settings say, WordPress sends a 301 redirect to the “home page” you set. Likewise, pages & posts redirect to their permalinks, and WordPress keeps a history of previous permalinks so you don’t lose SEO value when you shuffle content around your site.
In your case, that’s probably all you need. But, if you find yourself with inbound links pointing to content that’s moved, you want a plugin called Redirection (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/). Not only does it let you manage 301 & 302 redirects, it gives you a history of how people reached those outdated links so you know which sites to reach out to so they go fixed.
great site! tks so much, mod
You can also specify a canonical URL in a link tag:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html