SEO Friendly Tips to Choose Best URL

Guest article by Mr.Vinay from Tech18. This is a gift for all our readers on account of our 3rd anniversary celebrations.

Before we start developing any website or blog, we usually think a lot for URL. What kind of URL we should go for? How many letters long? We get lot of confusions while deciding a best URL. But we usually forget about the SEO part.

As a webpage developer and kind of SEO optimizer, I would like to say your URL also acts as a SEO keyword for Google spiders. Following are the few tips while choosing a URL for your website or blog or even a article URL inside your blog.

# 1. Short and descriptive URL

What you think about short and descriptive URL? Its very simple! What if you visiting some website like, allaboutyouandmeandmytechnology.com! Can you even read the URL which you are trying to visit! Same thing with Google as well. Treat yourself as a Google who is visiting your site and see what will happen.

According to Matt Cutts in and interview with Stephan Spencer

“If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

GC Note: Stephan Spencer is a Founder and President of Netconcepts. Matt is Google engineer extraordinaire, head of the Webspam team at Google.

# 2. DO NOT use auto-generated ID and numbers

When a new URL is generated Google visits that link to check the content and provide page-rank to that link. Before it does even Google will check the URL for SEO.

If you are using some auto-generated ID or numbers like

http://www.abcdefgh.com/i?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5e,

will it make any sense? Reader cannot make it out easily about the content inside the article.

# 3. Keyword in URL

Keeping in mind about the auto-generated ID or numbers, it is advisable to have some SEO friendly keywords in your URL. Even Google will search for a keyword in your URL. A normal gets attracted towards the URL which briefs about the article or content inside the URL.

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# 4. Hyphens (-) instead of Underscores (_)

Matt Cutts says,

If you have a URL like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a URL like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

What you think about this Google search algorithm? It is easy to read http://www.gadgetcage.com/2010/08/7-best-sites-to-grade-your-twitter-profile.html than, http://www.gadgetcage.com/2010/08/7bestsitestogradeyourtwitterprofile.html or http://www.gadgetcage.com/2010/08/7_best_sites_to_grade_your_twitter_profile.html

# 5. Case Sensitive

Most of the people use standard lower case URL’s. It is advisable to use lower case URL because if you are using URL’s in upper case and somebody links to your post with lower case URL, both of you might loose Google PR Juice. Avoid 404 error page!

# 6. Avoid multiple parameters

Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site if your URL contains multiple parameters.

# 7. Session ID and Sorting parameters in URL

Avoid using any session ID or sorting parameters in your URL as you may get some duplicate URL’s. You will never be knowing how many number of duplications are there with same session ID! Crawlers usually perform some type of URL normalization in order to avoid crawling the same resource more than once.

# 8. Avoid EXE in URL

Google crawler doesn’t crawl disallow the URL having EXE in it. So please avoid using exe.

9. Special Characters

Not all search engines don’t crawl pages with special characters and generated dynamically by cgi scripts. So try to avoid to present your web pages as cgi generated pages.

# 10. Content Friendly URL

Last but not least! Choose the URL with matches your website or blog. Do not choose URL like abcdef.com for technology related site!

URL of any website or a blog should be as simple as possible. The structure should be user friendly so that a reader can identify the content inside the article by looking into the URL rather than just long ID numbers.

In this article I would be telling you how to make SEO friendly URL structure so that you can rank your blog or website article higher in Google and other search engines.

Are you following all this tips? Like to add some more tips? We would be glad to see your view. Thanks for reading my post.

Tagged as: Blogging, Internet, SEO, Tips and Tricks