Search Friendly URL Setup & Management

Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs Designed to Drive Traffic and Sales

URLs are one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO tactic. Especially if you have a new website, how you structure your URLs will play a crucial role in your organic rankings. Whether you’re using blogging software or designing your site from scratch, it’s essential to take the steps necessary to ensure that your site has search-friendly URLs. While on-page optimization and valuable content also play a significant role (among other things) when it comes to organic rankings when your URLs are appropriately optimized, you create a page that’s easy for engines to crawl, and easy for web users to understand.

You will find that the proper use of this strategy will reinforce other SEO strategies. The foundation of a good SEO optimized pages begins with the URL and continues into the page structure and organization. The combination of these techniques during initial development will be sure to move you up in search rank.

Search Friendly Basic URL

URL Structure Matters for both Websites and Blogs

If you use a blog template such as WordPress or Joomla, you may have noticed that they can change how your URLs are named. By default, all posts are created with a number, and that number is considered the URL. Rather than that, make sure to change it so that your post matches your blog entry title. You’ll need to take an additional step to ensure that your title is relevant to your content and that it’s keyword-friendly.

Search Friendly Basic URL
Search Friendly Long URL

URLs that are Readable by both Humans and Google

Categories, unlike posts, are given the name that you provide the category. If you’d like to make your URLs for categories a little more search-friendly, you can manually adjust the name of the URL when you create the category to include an extra keyword relevant to the page. Take care only to do this when you’re creating the page, or you’ll stir up a whirlwind of 404 errors that Google and other major search engines don’t like. If you must change URLs after the fact, make sure to use 301 redirects so that all SEO juice is transferred to the new URL.

Laying out and Displaying your URLs in a Professional Manner

There are several ways that you can layout search-friendly URLs on your website. If you don’t plan on changing your category URLs, make each post or item that you have on your page a sub-page of said category. If you plan on changing your page over time, you can opt not to include the category within the URL.