How To Optimize Your URLs For SEO?

You should optimize your URLs for SEO. Although this can be considered only a small information about the location of the website, it contains much more information. URLs actually give search engines information about a page’s content, context, and destination.

Optimize your URLs for SEO

URL must be readable by everyone

Both readers and search engines must be able to read your URL. Search engines, like readers, read the words in the URLs to know what the page is going to be about. This is why you shouldn’t use dynamically generated URLs and customize them to fully understand your content and goal.

Organize your content

Search engines consider websites in the root folder to be the main content that should take precedence over others. That’s why you need to categorize your URLs to clearly identify and show search engines which URL should get a little boost in the SERPs.

Do not use capital

Capitalization can confuse search engines and readers as it can make it difficult to understand.

Prefer hyphens to underscores

Google bots are actually set up to read dashes and not underscores. You must use this rule if you want to have a chance to get a rating.

Add your mobile URLs to the Sitemap

It’s a good way to tell search engines which websites are mobile-friendly and which aren’t. These first ones seem to be higher in the SERPs since Google’s mobile update. Although some experts say that it is not necessary to include responsive URLs in your sitemap, it is safer to do so.

Include your target keyword

Try to include your primary keyword in your URLs. While this can’t be done on your homepage in most cases, focus on integrating a target keyword related to your product or category pages.

Block dangerous URLs with robots.txt file

Bad URLs can get you penalized by search engines, by indexing duplicate URLs or other non-optimized URLs. You can have features on your site that generate filters that generate dynamic and duplicate URLs. Additionally, you can block these URLs using a robots.txt file.

Canonicalize your URLs

Some pages can create duplicate content when, for example, they are dynamic pages with filters. The way to prevent this action is to use canonical URLs. This tag can be used if you want a particular URL to become preferred even if others point to the same content. You should also set a preferred URL domain. In fact, search engines perceive www, https, non www, etc. as different web pages and then categorize this content as duplicate. Another way to avoid duplicates is to set dynamic parameters and tell search engines when to ignore those parameters.

Don’t forget 301 redirects for broken URLs

If you need to change a page’s URL for any reason, be sure to inform search engines of its new location. In fact, there is a chance that the search engines have indexed this page. You don’t want to lose link juice from a well-ranked page, so you need to implement a 301 redirect to the old URL to tell Google’s crawlers your new destination URL.

Add a favicon

While they don’t have a direct SEO impact on your rankings, favicons have a lot of benefits. This little icon next to your URL in your browser helps to better recognize your site’s brand. It is also easier to bookmark your site. It will help you get more visibility for your brand.

Conclusion

Although it may seem clear enough on paper, the technique of URL optimization can be tricky. There are multiple variables to consider when structuring URLs to suit both human users and search engines.