What is the best URL structure for SEO?

Many visitors will reach your website by clicking on a link, so you might be wondering if what's in the URL of a particular page is really important.

You may be surprised to learn that when it comes to on-site SEO, what the URL looks like is really important.

What is the URL structure?

The website URL acts like your address on the web. It is the most direct way for someone to access a page on your website. If you are not familiar with the terminology, then a URL is simply something that begins with www or http.

In the early stages of starting a website, you'll need to sit down and figure out the standard structure for your website URLs. (If your site is up and running, it's not too late to do this right now, but you'll have to deal with more things.)

The URL always starts with the root domain for your website (eg www.yourwebsitename.com ), so what you want to define is what comes up next for the individual pages.

URL structure will be directly related to larger site architecture. You need your URLs to both reference the content on a particular page, while also helping to position website visitors to the position of this page on the larger website. For example, the URL for a blog post should look like this: www.yourwebsitename.com/blog/nameofyourblogpost.

At a glance, any visitor who visited the post through an external link will quickly be able to see that they are on a blog, as well as some basic information about the blog post. specific on the page.

Why is URL structure important?

The URL structure is important for several main reasons.

First, in order for Google to continuously deliver relevant results to searchers, it has to know what each page in the index is about. The URL is one of the most important parts of the page that Google considers to determine the content of the page.

Next, a visual URL structure makes your website easier to navigate for users. If someone browsing a clothing retail website finds themselves on www.clothesretailer.com/womens/dresses/nameofspecificdress , they will know that the page falls in the two categories that come before the last part of the html: womens (for women ) and dresses (dresses). Savvy web users also know that they can remove the last few parts of the URL ( dresses / nameofspecificdress ) to go back to choosing a wider range of women's clothing.

And finally, what makes a good, intuitive URL structure for users is also helpful for search engines. Search engine crawlers can easily create related connections between different pages of the website.

It can be seen that a particular item belongs to the same category as other apparel (even if the word ' dress ' is not in the product name), belongs to the larger women's clothing category on the website - helping crawlers have a better understanding of the different parts of the web page and how they are related to each other.

As an added benefit, placing those additional categories in front of specific keywords or product names in the URL adds some additional related keywords without generating a spam URL.

That gives Google a little more information to make sure it understands what is on the page and what keywords the page shows up when searching.

David Pac

Update 31 August 2020