An SEO friendly URL is a URL that is optimised to rank highly in SERPs and fulfil the searcher’s needs and queries. URLs which are optimized for SEO are normally short and keyword-rich.
Importance Of SEO Friendly URLs
SEO friendly URLs are important for a few reasons. They help both users and crawlers understand the content of your web page, and discover its relevance. They also help to instate a website hierarchy.
When a URL is optimised for search engines, it will be easier to crawl and rank higher in SERPs, meaning your website will have higher visibility, a better click-through-rate, more traffic and decreased bounce rate.
How To Make URLs SEO Friendly
There are a few fundamental rules to follow when creating your URL to make sure it is SEO friendly.
1. Focus Is Key
You need to make sure your URL is focused and easy to read. In order to ensure readability, get rid of function words, stop words and verbs. It should also be kept as short as possible, because Google cuts off URLs after 512 pixels.
Additionally use hyphens to separate words, rather than underscores.
2. Omit Dynamic Parameters
This goes hand in hand with focus. Including dynamic URL parameters may result in your URLs appearing truncated in SERPs in addition to appearing unprofessional to end users.
They have their place, but when creating URLs from an SEO standpoint, it’s best to avoid them where you can.
Do this:
Not this:
3. Use Canonical Tags
For URLs with similar content, use canonical tags to prioritise one page that will appear in SERPs, to prevent duplicate content.
4. Incorporate Keywords
Conduct top notch keyword research and then integrate target keywords relevant to your page content into the URL. This will demonstrate your page’s relevancy to the searcher’s query, and has been shown to heavily influence whether or not a searcher will click.
5. Ensure URLs Match Page Titles
Doing this ensures that your page delivers on what it advertises in SERPs. This means increased page authority, which will be rewarded with more traffic and higher ranking.
6. Submit Your URLs to Your XML Sitemap
Submitting your URLs to your XML Sitemap will ensure that the Google crawlers can discover, identify, crawl and index the right pages on your website.
7. Spend Time on Picking the Right Domain Name
This is also an essential factor when creating an SEO friendly URL. Using .com or .co.uk will assure the end user that your website is reliable and legitimate.
8. Don’t Include Dates
This may have been a more popular technique back in the day but it’s not looked upon fondly in 2020. Not only does it overcomplicate your URL, but it also makes it more difficult to update your page. And, good SEO is all about quality and fresh content.
What Tools Can Help You Optimise Your SEO?
Creating the perfect URL is not an easy task, but there are tools out there to help you.
Raven Tools
UTM Tag Builder
LandingI
Piwick Pro
Tilda
ASAPI rewrite
How Can We Help?
Have a sneaking feeling that you’re going to need to overhaul your site’s URLs?
If the job seems too daunting - do get in touch with us and we could pair you with a team that can make the task more manageable for you.
In the meantime, for other SEO help - why not head on over to our training courses where our tips and strategies can help you beat the competition.
