What Are SEO Friendly URLs?

Bloggers are usually concerned about their websites because they always think whether they have good URLs which are very much user friendly or not. In fact a lot of bloggers do change the URLs regularly for better SEO impact. But the thing is that this is not at all recommended to change the URLs as it hardly impacts on SEO.

Credit : Google Image

How does it impact on changes made for URLs :

Most of the bloggers prefer making SEO friendly URLs before launching it. And doing this is not wasting time as it directly has an impact on website traffic. So it is always recommended to make you website's URLs SEO friendly.

Sometimes we can ignore the changes when we feel that the URL is not that much bad in terms of SEO concerns because we may have loss of traffic and damage our website.

Some of the reasons for changing URLs slightly are mentioned below:

1. Changes of Keywords

We are aware of the following link type:

http://example.com/product.php?id=12345&color=2&size=2&session=54321

It is not like that where Google won't find the URL but it is not user friendly as it has no keywords in it. Google will list it in its search engine with dynamic id and session but it is difficult to remember. So for SEO point of view these type of URLs should have to be changed.

Now consider the URL below :

http://example.com/blog.php?topic=how-to-swim

With the following one :

http://example.com/blog/how-toswim

Now the question is that, which can be considered as the best one. Though both the URLs are having keywords but a little difference is there. We suggest to go for second option if your blog is new and under construction. It requires specific URL. And if your blog is already have a good status in Google search or in the web and it is established already then either of them would work. No matters which one you use.

2. Structure of the URL

Most of the bloggers have an idea that the page with the category URL would better work in Google search as per as the SEO is concerned. But this is not at all the real scenario as Google will take time to list the page which is having sub page inside a category from the main domain, which makes an URL unnecessarily big where Google always prefer short URL. It is not at all recommended to publish an article which is some steps away and separated by pages from main domain. See the example below. 

http://example.com/health/fitness/how-to-swim

is not at all a better URL than the following one

http://example.com/how-to-swim

3. Length of the URL

In many cases this is overlooked but in fact this is the most important thing when publishing a content with the URL. We suggest to have some simpler and short URL. Though all the internet browsers support at the maximum limit of characters which you will never reach but still for better ranking in search result you should maintain some user friendly and short URL.

Longer URLs have disadvantages as follows:

• Normally most of the social media applications cut off the URL.
• If it is not user friendly then there is always a possibility of cut off while copy pasting the link by users
• Longer URLs can not be remembered easily
• CTR and usability are always affected in longer URLs

What would be a better way to shorten the URL?

Consider the following URL

http://example.com/blog/posts/all-posts/post-looking-for-making-coffee

In the above example we can see that some of the words are repeated unnecessarily. We can easily avoid the repeating words.

http://example.com/blog/posts/all/looking-for-making-coffee

So the above one is much more better and useful URL for SEO purposes.

4. How to go for Stuffing Keywords

Using more than one keyword in a post page is wrong. Consider the following URL which has got 2 keywords for the particular post:

http://example.com/health/fitness/swim-how-to-swim

The above URL is totally unaccepted in purpose of SEO and doesn't make you rank better as here you are unnecessarily stuffing keywords. Using 2 keywords in a same post title looks like a smappy URL and might not get listed in Google search sometimes. So better to focus on the important things as per SEO is concerned and not stuffing keywords in an attempt to get listed quickly.

5. Suggestions : 

We have already explained why changing every URL of an established website is risky and it harms your site ranking but if you want to do it after all, make sure you are doing it properly. Some of the things that are really important when changing your URLs are mentioned below:

• 301 redirects
• On page links update
• New XML sitemap
• Old XML sitemap

301 redirects are the very important part while changing the website URLs. These links are most important to the search engine specially in Google bot and you should update all the links.

Keeping XML is always good but we should not keep both the old and new XML files. We can remove the old XML file after 2-3 days. The new links will be automatically crawled by Google bot and can get in Google search result. If your 301 redirects are working properly then there is no reason to think of some duplicate contents.

So we hope that you have got a detailed idea about the SEO friendly URLs.