Daneswood
Exeter Web Design and Digital Marketing Agency - we've built over 900 websites for businesses, charities and public bodies. We specialise in Web development, eCommerce, Digital marketing, Branding, Positioning, Design and Print. Based in Exeter, in Devon, we have clients across the UK. Contact us for help making your marketing more effective.
Every agency wants to make sure their clients have healthy Search Engine Optimization (SEO), because without SEO, how would your website rank well in Google?!
We’re talking about the basics here, ranging from content strategies, to link building and meta data. Sometimes when we think too much about SEO, basics get overlooked. Sometimes it can be helpful to revisit the fundamentals of a good online presence and SEO, to make sure you are covering all your bases.
One fundamental of SEO is your website’s existing URL structure. It might not be the biggest surprise for SEO but having optimised URL structures can really help to push your SEO to the next level by:
- Having more clickable links
- Making it easy for search engines to crawl your site
- Finding yet another way to clean up your online presence for optimum ranking position
Without further ado, let’s get into how to create a URL that will have a positive effect on your search engine visitors.
Keywords
Keywords in the URL help indicate to users who see your URL on social media, an email or a link that they hover over. When a user hovers over a URL with keywords in it, they will know what they are getting before they click through.
Secondly, URLs get copied and pasted regularly and when there is no anchor text used in a link, the URL acts as the anchor text. This is perfect for rankings, as it could be your own URL blog which then gets copied into another blog (used for credit in similar blogs).
Thirdly, the keywords in the URL show up in the search results. We think this is one of its best points. The research has shown that the URL is one of the most important elements which visitors consider when deciding which site to click on.
Shorter >Longer
Shorter URLs are preferred, as they are easy to read and generally more clicked on. But if you have URLs that have 100+ characters, then you have to come up with a URL rewrite strategy, and gain value. They are also easy to remember, as you can type them in directly to the search bar.
Longer URLs aren’t a problem, but generally speaking people will have an issue glancing at a long URL, so make sure it has those relevant keywords in there. But in terms of being neat, shorter URLs make it easier to copy and paste, to share on blogs, social media and even to embed. These might not be the biggest changes, but it can certainly improve your ranking factor and reach.
Match them to titles
As the header says, we agree that having a similarly worded URL structure can greatly improve your organic acquisition.
Remove unwieldy punctuation
Obviously these make the URL look cluttered and as touched on before this isn’t any help when trying to make a URL SEO perfect. Not only this, but some punctuation has the potential to break certain browsers and crawlers.
I hope this blog has been helpful in showing you a few areas in which you can improve your URLs in SEO*
If you would like help getting your SEO up to speed, please contact Luke on 01392 248 365 or luke@daneswood.co.uk
*We would like to thank Moz for inspiring this blog and providing the information.
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls