Creating a website that is fully search engine optimized is a goal that we all have in common. The better our sites are optimized, the more traffic we get. One thing a lot of us don’t realize is how important it is to optimize our URLs to increase the overall optimization of the site. So to help you out, we are going to be cover some tips to help you with your URLs.
Figure Out The Keywords for the Page
The first thing you need to do is to research your keywords carefully. If you already have an SEO strategy, then you probably already have a list of keywords that you will be trying to target. These are extremely important and should be implemented in your titles and other main areas. If you haven’t done your keyword research yet, you should hold off on creating any content or new pages until you do.
Include Title of Page
The title of your page is going to be what search engines look at first and weigh the most. It should include your keywords and what the whole article is about. Once you have created the page, you should make sure that the title is listed inside of the URL. This way, when the search engines are crawling through your site, they know exactly what the page is about before they even get into it.
Include Where the Page is Located
In the URL, you should be able to see what the page is and where the page is located within the website. As an example, take a quick look at this URL: www.ExampleURL.com/blog/archive/example -of-url/. By reviewing this URL, you can tell what the page is about, and how to navigate to it if you wanted to start from the beginning.
Don’t Allow any Special Characters or Random Letters & Numbers
You should never allow any type of random things to enter into your URLs. A lot of websites out there use sequences of letters or numbers that make absolutely no sense at all. For example: www.ExampleURL.com/1597362/sdw%dsaw53/. What does that even mean? The cleaner and simpler your URL looks, the better it is going to be in the eyes of search engines.
Remove All Periods That are Not Necessary
A myth about URL optimization is that if you place a period before and after your keywords, search engines will pay more attention to them. This is not true at all. In fact, search engines don’t even recognize periods, so using them will give you no SEO benefits at all. The only thing they will do is make certain programs get confused about what exactly the file type could be if you input the URL.
Using these tips to help your URLs will definitely improve your site’s SEO and could increase your rankings. There is no reason not to implement these because even if you don’t gain a lot of rankings, they are still much more user friendly
About the Author:
Ness is a blogger with a great passion for SEO and internet marketing. She is also a contributor for http://make-a-web-site.com – a website dedicated to bloggers and internet marketers. They provide tutorials on how one can have their own website even without enough technical know-how.
