Being well-positioned on Google (or other search engines) is undeniably a crucial goal for a website. Improving your website's position from 8 to 4 in a Google search can lead to an average of four times more visitors, and if you reach position 1, it's an additional twelvefold increase! [1], [2]
In this series of posts, I want to show you what you can do to optimize your site for search engines.
Each post will explain a "to-do" for your website's SEO.
The prerequisite is always that the absolute basics of your website are in place! This means you have relevant content, well-written texts, appropriate keywords for your target audience in your texts, and a clear and appealing website design. This also includes a proper navigation system to make all content easily accessible. If these basics are not in place, further tricks won't do much for your SEO.
Let's start with To-Do #2 for your SEO - A good URL structure!
URL structure and SEO
A good URL structure is essential for SEO because it helps search engines better understand a website's content and structure, influences user behavior, and facilitates a structured website layout.The following points are important:
Readability
Use clear words, avoid cryptic characters.Readable URL:
https://yourwebsite.com/example-url
Unreadable URL:
https://websitexyz2.com/example17xp
Relevance
The URL should clearly reflect the page's content.For example, if you have a website about recipes:
Relevant URL:
https://your-recipes.com
Irrelevant URL:
https://your-cool-website.com
Conciseness
Keep URLs as short as possible without sacrificing relevant information.For example, if you have a website about recipes:
Concise URL:
https://your-recipes.com
Too long URL:
https://recipes-cooking-baking-delicious-yums-healthy-fitness-protein.com
Structure
URLs should reflect your site's structure.For example, if you have a "Blog" subpage on your website and it lists all the posts you've written for the blog, the URL for the Blog subpage could be:
https://yourwebsite.com/blog
and the individual posts would have URLs like:
https://yourwebsite.com/blog/post-topic
Hyphens Instead of Underscores
Search engines prefer hyphens over underscores to separate words.Hyphens:
https://your-website.com
Underscores:
https://your_website.com
Lowercase
URLs are case-sensitive - /blog is generally NOT the same as /Blog.For better clarity and consistency, you should use lowercase, as search engines prefer it.
Consistent Lowercase:
https://your-website.com
Inconsistent Lowercase:
https://Your-Website.com
Static URLs
URLs can contain dynamic parameters like "?id=123".In some contexts, this makes sense and is necessary, for example, if you have a website with hundreds of recipes, and the ID of a recipe is included as a parameter in the URL to avoid creating hundreds of separate subpages.
However, if you can avoid dynamic parameters, you should, as it makes your website more discoverable and accessible to search engines.
Canonical Tags
If you have different versions of the same page or if a page can be reached through multiple URLs, it can confuse search engines.For example, if you have a subpage on your website that lists all your blog posts and it's accessible through both the URL
https://your-website.com/blog
and https://your-website.com/posts
you should use a canonical tag to indicate which URL is considered the "preferred" one for search results.For each version of the same page, you should include the following on your page, where the href="" points to the preferred "canonical" version of the page:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://your-website.com/blog">
Permanence
Don't change URLs constantly; try to keep URLs as stable as possible.If you do need to change a URL, implement a redirect from the old to the new URL so that the page can still be found through the old URL. This is helpful for user-friendliness and for search engines.
Sources
[1] Granka, Joachims & Gay. Eye-Tracking Analysis of User Behavior in WWW Search. 2004.[2] Beus. Click Probabilities in Google SERPs. 2015.
Share this post! Support this blog🙏