Every brand wants to have its website ranked on Google and bring in organic traffic, customers, and so on. A well-optimized website not only helps achieve this but also highlights the benefits of a website, such as increased visibility and credibility. Choosing catchy business name ideas can further enhance brand recognition and attract more visitors to your site. To achieve the result, several strategies such as content updation, keyword research, internal linking, etc are done. However, the URLs are often overlooked in such scenarios. It is important to make your site URLs SEO-friendly as they play a vital role in ranking and generating traffic. For that you need to learn the top URL best practices which is what we are going to explain in this blog, let’s get started.
Think of URLs as the online address of your business websites. When customers input this address into the search bar, it should take them to your site. A standard URL is comprised of various elements as shown in the image below:
Now when it comes to SEO-friendly URLs these are web addresses that are designed to be easily readable by users and search engines. For this, they have to be clear and include relevant keywords. Having URL structure best practices enabled offers several long-term perks which are as follows:
Minimal Bounce Rate: Before hitting the enter button, if customers can identify the relevance of your website from the URL itself, they will stay longer thereby minimizing bounce rates.
Improved Crawlability: SEO-friendly URLs that have clear names and descriptions make it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate and index web pages.
Better Ranking: Since URLs are one of the various ranking factors by Google, employing SEO URL best practices helps search engines understand what your site contains and increase the chances of ranking.
So, have you decided to create and optimize SEO-friendly URLs for your brand? In that case, you will want to try out these URL best practices to get the best possible results.
Be any business, your website URL must be easy to read, understand and share. URLs that are long and cluttered can overwhelm users and deter them from visiting. Shorter URLs will have better chances of getting higher rankings, click-through rates, etc. Let’s take an example:
Which of the two would get better visibility and perform well in the SERPs? The second one of course. By adding only necessary information and leveraging the best URL shortners strategy such as this one, websites can offer a cleaner user experience for visitors.
One of the SEO URL best practices is adding keywords to the URL. By adding such terms, search engines get clarity on what the topic is about and customers will know what to expect upon clicking the link. However, whenever you incorporate keywords, make sure that it correctly describes what your webpage content is and aligns with their search intent.
Even though your URL must be created using top SEO URL best practices, the contents in it must be written for humans too. As explained earlier, shorter URLs are more pleasing to the eye and have better chances of being ranked. Consider the example below:
Out of the two, which one has the higher chance of being read by humans? Search engines will likely process both links however, the shorter one will be ranked over the long one. This is because it meets user intent and consists of SEO-friendly content.
You must have seen that the words in a URL are separated by hyphens. This is often a fundamental URL best practices for creating SEO-friendly websites. These hyphens serve as separators that allow the URL to be easily interpreted by search engines. Apart from that, they also provide better readability to the users who can quickly identify the terms in the URL upon glancing.
There are certain things to avoid whenever you are creating URLs through the best practices URL structure. Including these factors can make your URL complicated, and affect rankings and visibility. This includes dates, uppercase letters, special characters, and stop words such as “and,” “the,” or “of”. If your website URL has any of these, it’s time to delete them fast.
If you looking to implement SEO URL best practices, this one’s it. We had explained earlier that a URL consists of various elements. One of them is TLD or a Top-level domain, which is what you should use for your URL. TLDs are terms that follow the final dot of a domain name. Some of the most popular ones are ‘.com‘, .org’, ‘.edu’, etc. Since customers often look for these terms, if your URL has it, then people are more likely to trust your site and this positively impacts SEO.
Security has a huge role in the online world. With various cybercrimes happening, it’s important to secure your website and users must know they are visiting a secure website. This is why you should use the HTTPS protocol for encryption purposes. Most customers only trust and prefer to do business with secure websites. Just make sure your site is on the safe side by implementing cutting-edge URL structure best practices.
Incorporating canonical tags is one of the classic technical SEO slug best practices. Search engines often have difficulties identifying the preferred version of a webpage when multiple URLs lead to similar content, particularly on websites with numerous product pages. This is where canonical tags help search engines choose the preferred webpage version. Through this approach, website owners can avoid potential penalties associated with duplicate content.
Run out of URL structure best practices? If there is one thing you must know about when creating URLs is that they must consist of lowercase letters, why? Search engines consider URLs as case-sensitive, where uppercase & lowercase letters are treated distinctly. This means that if there are two same URLs, one with uppercase and the other with lowercase, Google will treat them as separate web pages. What’s more, lowercase URLs are more likely to match user expectations. This results in improved click-through rates and engagement.
Your website URL should be easy to navigate for all kinds of users. This means that your website URL must have accessibility testing conducted. Being considered one of the best practices URL structure, the testing involves evaluating factors such as readability, compatibility with screen readers, keyboard navigation, etc. The testing ensures that users with disabilities can interact and engage with your website content. Apart from that, you can also find out any issues and rectify them to provide a stable user experience.
Creating the best SEO-friendly clean and clickable URLs isn’t that difficult. Even though the process involves technicalities, the ultimate aim is to implement SEO URL structure best practices to make your website discovered and shared by customers and search engines with ease. These strategies are the key to getting started and eventually harnessing the full potential of your URLs and driving organic traffic, increasing search rankings and more in the long run.
For such informative insights, connect with GTECH, a leading search engine optimization company in dubai, UAE.
Building an online presence is crucial for brands to achieve success, and recognition and drive…
On-page SEO factors are where the game lies when it comes to furthering the enhancement…
In case you didn’t notice, we are almost 1 month away from 2025. As months…
In the evolved digital environment today, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need to use every…
Local SEO is the backbone of digital marketing for businesses that are dependent on local…
You might be using several digital strategies in your business. For instance, content marketing. Just…