URLs for SEO
Introduction
URLs for SEO means the URLs should be SEO friendly for your page to rank on google quickly. Also, to meet the needs of both users and searchers. SEO-friendly URLs are short and straightforward and should be keyword rich.
Along with all the factors to rank on SEO like title, title tag, anchor text, meta description and content etc., the Url of your page is essential, too, for search engines what the page is about. URL is necessary since the Google SEO guide has an entire dedicated section for URLs in its guidelines.
How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs
Now that we have seen why and how essential URLs for SEO are. Let us now see how to make SEO friendly as you’ve got to rank on google to grow your online business. So now you can stop procrastinating and read the whole since we have made it simple for you.
Past is past. For the pages you’ve already made, if you want to make changes to those URLs, it will be difficult; secondly, it will take a lot of time. And lastly, you are creating more mess than making it right. Now, you can focus on your new pages and be careful and smart while working to make SEO-friendly URLs.
Let us look at some methods to make URLs for SEO means SEO-friendly URLs. Follow these steps in order:
- Always start with the page title.
- Remove special characters and numbers.
- Discard unnecessary information.
- Make it short like only a single focused keyword.
- Write it in the lower case.
- Make sure you replace the space between with a hyphen.
We will step by step explain how to tackle the above methods to make the URLs of your page SEO-friendly.
Start with the Title Page – ¬URLs for SEO
Most of the title pages make perfectly augmented URLs with a few changes. So, for example, you can write like “How to create a perfect Title?” “How to create SEO-friendly content?”
It will create perfect optimized URLs for your page. Be simple yet creative since there is a lot of competition on the internet. So if you want your page to rank at the top, you’ve to work on the URL too.
Remove Special Characters and Numbers
Special characters like brackets []and exclamation ! . are unsafe for your URLs. That is the reason we have never seen the URLs. Why? They have no use in the URL.
It will be hard for Google to recognize your page sometimes and for the users to find it on google, eventually not ranking the article on google and decreasing your traffic. So whenever you create your page URL, avoid them—even other characters like a full stop or comma, colon and semicolon etc.
A number is not a big issue if you mention them in the URL, but if you make changes in the post or article, like suppose 1″2 steps for skincare”, and you remove one step from the content, you have to change the URL too. So changing the URL can create an issue when ranking the page again, and if you forget to change it will create difficulty in search results.
URLs for SEO – Discard unnecessary Information
URLs should always be short, or even a single keyword is enough. However, there are some reasons why you should keep it simple.
- One of the primary reasons is that google prefers short URLs.
- Users can be overwhelmed by the long URLs.
- The whole URL will not be visible in the search results.
- Now you can use long tail keywords, but if they are essential, don’t fill them with unnecessary words or phrases.
Write it in the Lower Case – URLs for SEO
Different web servers have a dissimilar guidelines. So this step is not essential. Primarily, if you use WordPress, it will automatically change the URL to lowercase.
But sometimes, the content will be considered duplicate content because the words after the host name in the domain will be regarded as case sensitive and treated differently.
Remove Spaces or Replace it with Hyphen
If you don’t remove spaces in the URL, the browser will add %20 in between those spaces. Or, if you want to separate the words, you can add a ( – ) hyphen between those spaces to avoid excessive issues. Don’t get confused between underscore ( _ ) and hyphen ( – )
Conclusion
URL is essential for SEO since it is the central part of any page or website, so you have to work on it as you do for other factors. It is the first thing that will help users to find your page and search engine to rank it. So follow the methods that are mentioned above to get SEO friendly URL.