How To’s & TutorialsHow to write SEO-Friendly URLs for your WordPress site
Applying SEO-friendly URL structures is one of the easiest and most popular SEO optimization strategies.
Thanks to solid and well-constructed URLs, the indexation of your website can become as easy as a pie, but unlike one would expect, there are many websites which are still using suboptimal and incorrect links.
Choosing the most SEO-friendly and appropriate URL has been debated numerous times, and has therefore been in the focus of the digital marketing industry for many years.
Most of the time is devoted to the SEO factors, as for instance primary keyword inclusion and making combinations to arrive at the perfect URL structure.
What we’re trying to do in this article is to observe some of the main URL elements, and explain how to achieve perfect and highly-ranking structures.
Bringing together the ‘www’ and ‘non-www’ domain versions
As always, your domain will be indexed in the search engine with two the most important versions, namely the ‘www’ and the ‘non www’ one. It is far better to consolidate both of them, and there are many ways to achieve that. What we will discuss, however, is the most common practice.
What SEO professionals do in this case, is to redirect to the first, then to the second version of the website (or in the opposite order) using 301.
It’s true – most of us would ask why worrying about different domain versions is so necessary, but consolidating them is the key to making sure that all backlinks will point to the same version, and will display all information correctly.
If you feel like trying out a more professional way than 301 redirect, you can proceed by explicitly establishing a link between the versions, ideally using canonical tags or Google Webmaster Tools.
Including keywords
Keywords are the king of SEO, and the main ones among them must be included in the URL of your website. In fact, that’s the fastest and easiest way to optimize your posts.
So why would people skip using keywords? Most of the time, they’re afraid not to over-optimize, and that’s, in fact, a genuine risk.
While including an important keyword in the URL structure of a particular blog post can be the smartest optimization trick you’ve ever performed, it can also look a bit superficial and unnaturally stuffed.
Unless you can find a really smooth and unforced way to include the keyword, it might be better to skip it.
Canonicalizing several URLs directing to the same content
It doesn’t even have to be multiple URLs – even if you have two of them, you should canonicalize them through the classic 301 redirect process, or use a rel=canonical in case you want to preserve both versions and make them slightly different (for instance, providing users with print-friendly pages of the website).
Obviously, it doesn’t have to mean that the search engine will penalize you for having duplicate content (as long as you’re not duplicating all the time), but what could happen and harm your search traffic potential is the splitting of your rank signals.
What we’re trying to say is that it is much better to have the rankings of page A and page B canonicalized and earn more visits, than letting them rank separately.
Work more on readability
When users can read and understand a URL, that’s a good and clean one, and keywords have nothing to do with it.
Optimization of URLs comes only later when the owner wants to make sure users will click on that blog post and read the content rather than simply understanding what it is about.
In fact, search engines are in a constant development process, and they are relying more and more on the behavioral and data signals coming from users in order to identify the right position of any web page.
At the end of the day, it is an engagement that rules the process, and readable URLs have a lot to do with the engagement.
What has to be achieved is that the user will know that clicking on a link can redirect him in a certain place, thus he will be motivated to click it. It basically means that readable URLs are user-friendly URLs, and such can generate more targeted traffic than you ever imagined.
Short works better than long
If we had to generalize, we’d advise you to keep URLs shorter rather than longer. By short, we don’t expect you to cut content radically and to introduce 40-character URLs, but an average of 50-60 characters that are easy to read and understand.
In case you’ve been working with 100+ ones, it may be the time to rewrite those and to make the most of their value.
This is not a specific Google/Bing requirement – in fact, search engines are completely enabled to process lengthy URLs without necessarily considering them as less valuable than the shorter ones, but what can be a real trouble in the case is compromised user experience.
Long URLs affect usability, unlike shorter ones that easily copied/pasted, parsed, embed, and shared on social media, and may, therefore, improve the amplification of every post, pin, tweet, email, and so on both directly and indirectly.
Stop words are not essential
When titles and headlines include some stop words (but, and, of, a, and so on) you don’t have any need to include them in the URL. If you want you can do it, but most owners decide to skip them in order to keep their URLs shorter and easier to read.
Consider both length and readability, and try to make the smartest decision for your website.
Take a look at whatever post you like: odds are good that there will be no stop words because it is much simpler to get the point of something that has been presented in that way, together with the benefit of having the URL shorter than usual.
Overdoing and repeating keywords make your website look pointless and spammy
Think of yourself as the user: how do you feel about URLs where the same words are repeated multiple times? Most searches dislike this practice to the extent of avoiding the website completely and choosing a most trustworthy one instead.
It may sound counterintuitive, but repeating the same keywords won’t improve search rankings: Google and Bing are no longer relying on simple algorithms to rate websites based on the number of times a particular keyword appears in a URL, but will rather grant you a click for a simplified, single-matching keywords URL.
Matching titles and URLs
The simplest way to optimize your SEO is to make the connection between titles and URLs clearly visible. Matching the URL to the post it contains is one of the most important SEO factors, and there is a good reason for it.
The practice is popular and preferred right because users are informed what type of content you’re going to provide them by simply looking at the URL and the keywords it contains. A mismatch between the URL and the title is among the most frequent bounce reasons, and should, therefore, be avoided.
When it comes to the search engine, you should know that they have the same expectations as the users themselves. They follow the content of the URL to guess what your content may be about, and classify your pages accordingly.
Building expectations is the ultimate purpose of having a URL at all, which is why titles and URLs should contain the same keywords.
Conclusion
As it is clear by now, it is not rocket science to optimize your website and make it more usable. The tips you should follow refer to readable and user-friendly URLs which resemble a clear connection to the content displayed on the pages. In addition, you can rethink your keyword strategy and focus on using them in the most appropriate way.
Still, when including keywords, try to avoid over-optimization as Google may consider your website as spammy, and users may skip opening it for the same reasons.
Search engines are no longer the same – they evolved massively in past years, and are currently smarter than ever before. Overdoing and repeating keywords don’t help your traffic generation efforts, the same way it won’t help search engines to find you, or users to become interested in your content.
