URL structure is extremely important when managing websites SEO. A URL is the address for the website that acts as the directive towards a specific page. This helps users and search engine to represent the channel to which the online users reach your site. Making sure that your URL is concise helps the crawlability of your site.
Good URL: nike.com/sneaker-deals
Bad URL: nike.com/page/c/65343-ed
Why Does Structure matter?
Search engines operate on signals that act as surface level representations of the site like landing page experience, fast load times, and even URL. Optimizing the URL can help the search engine find your website and represent to the users what the page is about by including specific keywords within the URL. These optimized links help design categories within your webpage which can make it easier for search engines to distinguish and meet the needs of the search query. Solely optimizing the URL does not improve your ranking on these search engines. The work must still be put in to improve content quality, provide backlinks to other credible sources and priority landing pages on the site, and including keywords which fit the idea and offerings of the page.
How we can optimize the URL and how this can affect UX
One of the primary purposes of SEO is to generate impression using effective assets to meet the needs of the online user. A user will not click on a link that looks untrustworthy and possibly put them at risk of potential viruses, information leaks, and deter them from reaching your webpage. The link acts as the directory towards your website which leads to another point in which structure of the webpage is extremely important. The content must be organized on the site to represent your most important to least important offerings/articles. A good practice is to organize the navigation bar from left to right with your most important stuff on the left, this is due to how people naturally scan stuff right to left while leaving your least important stuff on the right. This can be FAQs, About us, or links to our social media as the contact page.
Best ways to create a good URL
- Keep the URL nice and short
- Do not blend uppercase and lowercase letters
- Use lowercase characters
- Include keywords that are referencing to the webpage
- Customize the URL so It can match the webpage that the users are being directed towards
- Maximize readability
- Make sure that URLs are consistent structure to others
Mistakes that are made when creating URLs
- Using different characters in the URL that are unnecessary
- URLs that are over 50-60 characters
- Include unnecessary terms
- Include too many keywords
Improving Clicks
Click through rate is one of the primary goals when establishing a webpage. Improving the meta description is another way of improving scalability to the searcher. The meta description is a brief description of the webpage the user is being directed towards. Including relevant keywords in the meta description can help crawlability and readability to the user and the Google algorithm. We want to create seamless navigation towards our pages for the users to maximize on the user experience. Click-through-rate is not the only goal when improving the URL, we want to improve the extensions to our website and treat them with the same amount of effort that we manage our content on the pages.
Conclusion
URL strength is extremely important for many factors. Treating the representation on Google with the same respect that we treat the content on our webpage. We talked about many ways on how we can improve URL readability, strength, and keyword inclusion. Focusing on the improvements and making sure the URL is limited to 50-60 or under, include relevant keywords that tie to the directed webpage, and maintaining an all-lowercase structure can improve the click-through-rate of our webpage and crawlability from Google. Using our time efficiently to manage all aspects of the webpage is a must and a simple piece like URL cannot be overlooked.
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