URL structure

People often underestimate how important URL’s are in the overall search engine optimisation strategy of a website. It’s pretty much a given now that a clear, concise and logical URL structure will help with your sites overall SEO because like humans Google and the other search engines prefer content to be logically structured so that its easy to index and understand it.

Site URL’s

URL’s or Uniform Resource Locators as they are know in their more techy guise help direct users to servers across the Internet where websites live. Although there is no solid proof from Google or other search engines that a URL’s such as

www.indiantakeaway.com

performs better than a URL like

www.indian5647sads.com

It can be seen all over the Internet that a URL that contains words that are relevant to the content of a website will rank higher than a domain name that includes no relevant words. Obviously there are major factors about the on page technology and coding with help with how search engines view a site and the type of content it holds and these will be looked at over the coming weeks.

Section URL’s

Once you have picked your main URL the issue of optimisation doesn’t stop there, the actual URL structure of how selections of content are grouped also plays an important role. Taking the example of a URL such as the one above: www.indiantakeaway.com/london would be better placed in Google for searches of Indian takeaway restaurants in London than a URL such as www.indiantakeaway.com/325 if both the pages held the same content.

I always tend to look at a website like a massive filling system, all content including images should be filled correctly to help not only people but search engines locate content. By employing a URL structure that’s logical and relevant you will be going a long way to helping promote your site via natural search.

Most content management systems like Joomla and Drupal enable you to easily setup these structure in order to get the most out of your site with relation to hows its ranked.

Individual pages

Individual pages on a website will also substantially help with the ranking of your pages. Again using the example of the Indian takeaway website above the URL www.indiantakeaway.com/london/chutneys.html will perform better than www.indiantakeaway.com/325/45461.html

This is based on a number of different factors. Firstly the search engines will relate a search phrase to a specific URL. So a Google search for ‘Churneys Indian takeaway London’‘ would relate very closely to the optimised URL of www.indiantakeaway.com/london/chutneys.html.

The second factor in the importance of the URL structure of pages of sections is how these URL’s appear in search results pages. A URL like www.indiantakeaway.com/london/chutneys.html would be more appealing to me than www.indiantakeaway.com/325/45461.html because I would have an expectation of what I would be seeing once I landed onto the page. Google and other search engines use the number of clicks a search result gets to rank the website so by appealing directly to customers you can climb further up the rankings.

This post if part of the search engine optimisation 30 day guide