How to create SEO-friendly URLs
You probably know that the URL (Unique Resource Locator) is the home address of your site. It’s the one we type on our browser address bar when we want to access a website.
A thing you may not know is that the URLs affect SEO, too.
In this article, you will find out how to optimize URLs for SEO and turn them into allies for your ranking.
The importance of an SEO-Friendly URL
An SEO-Friendly URL is a web address that helps the user to remember the address and understand its logic. The latter is essential also for the crawler.
A proper SEO URL helps the crawler to understand what the user can find on that page. In this way, it can make the page available for the right query.
The structure of an SEO URL
A right SEO URL must be descriptive of the path of the page and the site structure. Besides, it must tell the user (and the spider) what it is going to find there.
Something like:
http:///www.mywebsite.com/category/keyword.html
An example of a properly optimized URL
Take the URL to our SEO Checker:
https://www.seotesteronline.com/seo-checker/
See? Pretty straightforward: there are our name and the tool you’re going to find.
Another example comes from our knowledge base.
Our subdomain (help) tells you that there you can find help. Where? On seotesteronline.com.
What follows tells you that you are inside the knowledge base, on the section dedicated to the keyword explorer.
And what are you going to find there? You can get from the last bit!
What is the slug and how to make it SEO-friendly
The last fragment of the URL (what-is-keyword-explorer) is called slug. It is the element that describes the page. Our advice is to use, for the slug, the main keyword you chose for that page.
Check your SEO-friendly URL
To summarize, here is a handy checklist to create perfect SEO-friendly URLs:
- Make them descriptive of the content and the site structure;
- Use pertinent keywords, especially on the slug;
- Use subdomains responsibly: the crawler can consider subdomains as separate websites, watering down your SEO efforts;
URLs must be easy to read for both users and crawlers. So keep them short, without too many subfolders or special characters (like the ones in dynamic URLs).
