URL Optimization: How To Make SEO Friendly URLs in 2023

URL Optimization is a process of preparing web page addresses and locations for displaying on the world wide web and making it relevant and readable by both robots and humans.

Experts at best SEO company will tell you that for SEO purposes, URL optimization is considered very important. This process is an integral part of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process. 

So let’s see how to do it.

 

What is a URL?

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a website or web page. A URL comprises two parts: the protocol and the hostname.

The protocol is used to specify how to retrieve a page from the server: HTTP & HTTPS. The hostname is the server hosting the site’s domain name or IP address. 

The leading SEO Company in Mumbai will tell you that URLs are case sensitive, and each component in a URL must be encoded with ASCII characters only, including spaces (e.g., www.example.com).

For example, if you want to access the article of Syspree about Voice Search SEO you can use https://syspree.com/voice-search-seo-guide/

 

How Does SEO URL Structure Work?

You must optimize your URLs to ensure that they are more search-engine friendly. This will help you rank better in search engine results pages (SERPs), improve user experience and boost your overall site traffic and conversion rates.

URL Optimization is a process of creating short URLs that are easy for both humans and search engines to read, understand and share. The first step is to understand how Google interprets URLs so that you can make them more meaningful to both humans and search engines.

The Web development company experts say that URLs are made up of two parts: the protocol (http://www) and the domain name (example.com). The protocol tells the browser where it is going, while the domain name tells it where it is coming from.

For example http://example.com/About/Contact-Us

The protocol tells Google what kind of website you are on, while the domain name tells Google where you are located. Google uses this information to rank websites based on relevancy.

 

How to make SEO friendly URLs

URLs are the most important part of your website. It’s easy to overlook them and just leave them as they are. But, if you want to increase your search engine rankings, then you have to optimize your URLs properly.

Here are some tips that will help you create SEO friendly URLs:

 

• Keep it short and simple. 

The shorter your URLs are, the better they will rank in search engines. It is always advisable to keep the URL as short as possible without losing any information or making it too confusing for others to understand.

Don’t add unnecessary words or characters to your URLs. For example, don’t put “the” or “and” or any other word in front of a keyword phrase. You can usually remove these words and still have an effective URL. For example, if your keyword is “the running shoes,” you could use www.example.com/running-shoes/. By removing unnecessary words you make it easier for people to read and understand what they’re clicking on (which is good for user experience).

 

• Use keywords 

When creating your website’s URL structure, it’s important that you include relevant keywords in the URL. This will help search engines find your content more easily and help them understand what the page is about. Use keywords in your URL. You can use up to 100 characters, but try not to go beyond 70 or 80. Some search engines may limit the number of characters you can use.

For example, if I have a blog post about cats, I might want to use the words “cat,” “pets,” and “animals” in my URL structure. These are all relevant terms that would help someone find my content on Google. So my URL might look something like this:

https://www.examplewebsite.com/blog-posts/cats-food-guide/

 

• Use lowercase letters 

The convention is to use lowercase letters and hyphens to separate words in a URL. For example, imagine you have a page on your site called “my-awesome-product.” You might want to link to it from other pages with the text “Visit My Awesome Product.” If so, then the URL would be https://www.examplewebsite.com/my-awesome-product.

If you wanted to display that same link as “My Awesome Product” instead of “my-awesome-product,” then the link would be myawesomeproduct.com or www.myawesomeproduct.com (if you have a domain name).

 

• Use hyphens 

A hyphenated URL is a great way to help search engines determine what your page is about. It makes it clear that the word after the hyphen is an important part of your website’s title. For example, if you have a blog post about “How To Write A Great SEO Content“, then you could name it: https://syspree.com/seo-content-guide/

When you are creating a new page or writing an article for an existing page on your site, try using hyphens in your URLs to make them more SEO-friendly.

 

• No special characters 

A website developers in Mumbai will tell you that Special characters such as ? & * + = ~ $ @ ^ / { } [ ] should not be used in URL paths because they can cause 404 errors if the path is typed by mistake and they can confuse search engines when they try to interpret them. 

Note that + is allowed in some cases like https://example.com/+post/1) but it’s better to avoid using it where possible just to be safe). If you need to use special characters (like ? & * + = ~ $ @ ^ / { } [ ]), then escape them by using a percent (%) sign.

 

• Do not include session IDs. 

The best way to create an SEO-friendly URL is to use clean-cut permalinks that don’t include session IDs or any other unnecessary information.

Each page on your website has a unique ID number that allows it to be tracked by the server. The problem with this is that these numbers become part of the URL, and when it comes to indexing your site by search engines, they have no value.

For example, if you have a blog post that has been viewed 25 times so far today, and you have been using permalinks like this:

/blog-post/?p=2367/

 

• Avoid Creating Dynamic URLs 

Dynamic URLs are the most common types of URLs that search engines face. They are generated by the server based on a combination of the user agent, page title, page contents, and other factors. Dynamic URLs can include session IDs or any other parameter that will change from one request to another.

Dynamic URLs are not SEO friendly because search engines cannot crawl them properly and index them. Also, dynamic URLs are hard for users to understand because they often contain parameters that make no sense to humans.

To avoid creating dynamic URLs, we should use static ones instead. Static URLs do not change from one request to another and can be easily crawled by search engines.

 

• Use HTTPs insted HTTP 

This means that all of your pages will be secure, which can help with conversion rates and search engine rankings. If possible, make sure that any links out from your site are also HTTPS so that they don’t get flagged as spam by Google (which may result in a penalty if it happens too often).

To do this, you will need an SSL Certificate for your site. This will ensure that your URLs remain in the same format (https://yourwebsite.com) and don’t change when you move domains or change hosting providers.

 

• TLD or Top Level Domain 

The TLD is the most important part of your URL. The TLD is the last part of your URL, after the domain name and before any sub-directories (for example, www). In other words, it’s the top-level domain of your website. There are many different types of TLDs available, but they are usually divided into two main categories: country code top-level domains (ccTLD) and generic top-level domains (gTLD).

Country Code Top Level Domains: Country code top-level domains are the most popular type of TLDs because they identify websites with a specific country or region. For example, .ca is the country code for Canada, and .de is Germany’s domain. Businesses will only use this type of domain with a physical location in that country.

Generic Top Level Domains: Generic top-level domains are not restricted by location and can be used by anyone regardless of where their business is based. Some examples include .com (which stands for commercial), .net (network), .org (organization), etc…

 

• Canonical URLs 

A canonical URL is a way for you to tell Google that there is one version of a page that should be indexed, and it should be indexed as the main URL. If you have multiple URLs with similar content, you can use a canonical URL to tell Google which version you want to be indexed.

Canonical URLs are also useful when you have duplicate content on your site. The canonical version will be indexed instead of duplicates. This is particularly important for mobile-friendly websites since Google favors mobile-friendly sites in its search results.

If you want to use a canonical URL, then this is how it works:

Use rel=canonical when linking to other pages on your website or any external site. You can also use this attribute when linking from another site back to yours. When using rel=canonical, make sure that all links point back to the original page (the one with the canonical tag).

 

• Avoid Duplicate URLs 

Duplicate URLs are a big no-no in SEO because they cause confusion in the search engines and can lead to duplicate content penalties. The easiest way to avoid this is by ensuring that every page on your website has a unique URL.

This means that if you want to create a new page, you should not use any of the following:

www.yoursite.com/somepage-name

www.yoursite.com/somepage-name/index.html

www.yoursite.com/somepage-name/index2=1

www.yoursite.com/somepage-name/index2=1?_pagetwo=2

 

• Get Rid of Stop Words In URLs or Junk Words In URLs 

Stop words list the most common words in the English language. They are words like “the” and “and” that are so common they don’t provide any value to the search engine algorithms.

The W3C has a list of stop words that you can use as a reference, but here is a list of some of the most common:

a, an, and, are, as, at, but, by, for, if, in, into, is not, no one or none, nor or nor-nor (not), not or no (not), now or now (now), of or off (of), on or upon (on), only or solely (only), or else (or else), other than (other than), such as this or that; then again; too.

 

• Add Breadcrumbs To URLs 

Breadcrumbs are a navigational aid that helps users understand where they are in the site structure and easily find their way back to the top-level page.

The web development company will tell you that the breadcrumb trail is typically shown on the right side of the page, separated by a forward slash (/) from the main content. It can also be placed within the main content, as in this example:

/breadcrumb-trail/

Breadcrumb trails can be added to URLs using a special syntax that takes advantage of a new HTML5 feature called rel=” prev” and rel=” next”.

For example, if you have three pages with these URLs:

/product/1234567890

/product/1234632132334

/product/1234654321123456

 

• Don’t Use Dates on URLs

In the early days of the internet, we could get away with putting dates in our URLs. For example, we might have a page about sales for April 2015 that we would link to by using the URL http://www.mystore.com/april-2015-sales/.  While this method works, it’s not the best practice.

Why? Because it means that if you ever need to update your content — perhaps because you’ve moved to a new CMS or changed your site design — then you’ll need to go back and change all of those old links. This is tedious work, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of pages.

Furthermore, Google is smart enough now to understand what different sections of a site are about based on their content and how they’re related to one another (e.g., they know that one section is part of another). They don’t like it when you use dates in your URLs because it makes it harder for them to determine which pages should be grouped together in their search results.

 

Conclusion

As we have seen, optimizing your URLs for search engines is an important task that can positively influence your page rankings in search engines. By taking the time to optimize your URLs to be keyword rich, you will give Google something to work with as it crawls your website.

By reconsidering and refining your URL structure and removing spaces, special characters and irrelevant query strings, you will give Google more information about the content of each page on your website. If you want your users to click on your links, make it easy for them… and in the end, that is what matters. By implementing this simple method into any website, you will make a dramatic improvement in the click through rate of your links – so take some time to implement these techniques today! If you want to learn about youtube ads check out our blog Youtube ads explained: why you should care and how to make them.