Thursday, January 12, 2012

How "Pretty" URLs Help Search Engine Optimization

If you think that it is only the title and description of the website which helps in better ranking, then you need to think again. The URL structure of the website should also be optimized, not only for the search engines but also for the users.

The URL’s first name consists of the domain name, where you can provide the important keywords of the website. The second part consists of the filename, which can be optimized easily. Simply add the focused keywords of the page (separated with hyphen).

Query strings are not good news for SEO
What exactly is query string - It is a string of characters at the end of the URL, which starts with a question mark and uses an ampersand (&) to separate values.

For example: http://www.xyz.com/articles.html?category=2@orderby=1

Why is it bad for SEO: First, URLs with query string are longer, which is no longer the optimized URL and hence loses the significance.
Secondly, it indicates that the page is created dynamically, which might create duplicate content issues (unintentionally though!). Also it is believed that search engines like clean static URLs, instead of messy dynamic URLs (since it’s easy to generate SEO spam dynamically).

Length: It is recommended to have short and descriptive URLs, containing no longer than 100 characters (say, 3-4 words, separated by hyphen).

URLs are case sensitive: Unlike domain names, URL is case sensitive.
For example: http://www.mustseeindia.com/Goa/how-to-reach is NOT the same as http://www.mustseeindia.com/Goa/HOW-TO-REACH

It is better to stick to standard lower-case version; otherwise one may lose the traffic and also create duplicate content issues.

File extensions: Take care of the file extensions. Don’t end URLs with .exe

2 comments:

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  2. SEO can be used to build links. It is the best suitable for your business and marketing purpose.
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