Best Practices for URL Optimization and SEO

Good SEO practices can mean the difference between a highly rated page on search engines and one that ends up buried many pages back. If you follow a few simple recommendations, your page hits on your web site can rocket upwards like a space shuttle.

Summarize Your Article in Your URL

Using Keywords Blog programs such as WordPress automatically generate a blog post based on your blog title, but it might not be the best for your SEO results. If you can eliminate extraneous words or numbers in your URL, you can rank higher on search engine results. With SEO research, you can identify keywords relevant to your article that are the most yield the highest rankings on the search engines.

Don’t Use Jargon and Keep It Simple

Numbers and dates in your URL and permalinks will dilute your search engine page results, according to SEO studies. They can confuse search engines interpretation of your web site. Additionally, it is better to use simple words than specific or convoluted words. Meaningful URLs are better than ones that seem arbitrary. For example, a website sells video games would be better served using a URL that properly categorizes the video game console (awesomevideogamesexample.com/xboxone/madden2015) than one that is for all consoles (awesomevideogamesexample.com/consoles/madden2015). In this instance, users who are looking for Madden 2015 for Playstation 4 would get annoyed when they find a page that is for the X-Box One version. Your “visitor dissatisfaction” for your site would be high in this instance.

Permalinks Should be Short and Sweet

Your URL or permalink should be about three to five words long to be optimized for Google search engines. Longer URLs that contain fifteen words or more can be considered spam on Google and other search engines, which will affect your overall page ranking when searched. Furthermore, extraneous words may be rated less than the truly relevant words that you are aiming for. Avoid Subdomains and Subfolders A page with its own subdomain will rank higher than one that uses the subdomain of another web site. For example, the link authority of a blog called BestFoodBlogEverExample.com is better than ChefMarkExample.com/BestFoodBlogEver. Likewise, using multiple folders in your URL will dilute your SEO results and page rankings.

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