SEO & Website Marketing Ideas / Tips

URL Be Better Off After Reading This

If you’re asking yourself why you should give so much thought to your website’s URL extension, you either don’t care about the number of hits, or you don’t realize just how important your URL extensions can be in attracting potential viewers to your site. URL affects usability and SEO (search engine optimization).

URL Basics

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locater, and a well thought out URL extension will certainly increase your rankings, as having a keyword featured in your URL will make the keywords more prominent. It will cause the mouse of many more a user to gravitate towards your link, as a keyword prominent URL is more attractive to the average user. It also gives the user a better feeling of orientation, and a clear URL will help him or her better understand the purpose of the particular section of the site he or she happens to be on.

Cluttered URLs

Unclear URLs will attract fewer users to your site, as will URLs with too many keywords. Include keywords in the URL, but make it seem as though each keyword is necessary, relevant and natural to the site it represents. A really effective URL would stick in the user’s head and be simple enough for the user to type in him or herself. For example, /2010/01/25/robots will attract far few users than /how-to-build-your-own-robot (if, of course, that is what the user is looking for).

Achieving a User Friendly URL

URLs filled with symbols will be far less attractive than one with very few. Rather than having URLs filled with symbols, users would much rather glide their eyes (and mice) over an easy to read URL. Depending on which word separator you use, you can avoid excessive symbols in your URL. If you save a file with spaces or ampersands, they will come up in the URL as totally different symbols. Obviously, URLs with fewer symbols in will be far more appealing than those clogged with numbers and percentage symbols. Using hyphens and underscores will allow for a much clearer URL overall.

WRONG:
Space: This separator’s URL is encoded as %20.
/example1%20example2

& (Ampersand): This separator’s URL is encoded as %26.
/example1%26example2
,/. (Comma/Full Stop): These separators are encoded as themselves, but are abused by spammers.
/example1.example2 and /example1,example2

RIGHT:
_ (Underscore): In the past it was not seen by search engines as a separator, but more recently it is beginning to.
/example1_example2

- (Hyphen): The optimum word separator.
/example1-example2

Other Points

Users much prefer short, easy to remember URLs, but it is very rare that users type URLs into their address bars. Because they will be reading URLs from search engines, search history or bookmarks, this means that short URLs are not compulsory, and longer URLs will have an equally positive effect provided that they are still easily intelligible. Google can handle lengthy URLs, and it will even break them down into SERPs (search engine results pages) or even substitute them with breadcrumbs.

Case Sensitivity

URLs are also case sensitive. This can cause massive confusion when /example1 leads to a different page that /EXAMPLE1 leads to. The best idea is to keep to lowercase letters.

URL Extensions

URL extensions (such as .html) have their own pros and cons. For the slightly savvier user, an .html extension will imply to both users and bots that the page using is a page with actual content. However, they do not boost rankings, and are considered unnecessary by many.

Simplify!

Remember that URLs should look natural and simple. URLs are important, and have the ability to draw or repel countless users, and adding a few keywords separated by hyphens will make for the most appealing sort URL.