Tuning Guide for a good SEO URL

What you need to know about optimizing URLs for SEO? This article outlines all the elements to know.

Everything you need to know to optimize its URL in the SEO

The format of the URL

First and foremost, make sure you have read the complete guide to the syntax of URL (sub domain, domain name, extension, directories, etc.)...

Presence of the keyword in the URL

First, I prefer to be clear: the URL is far from being the main element to optimize the ranking of a page. Before you ask whether to put keywords in the URL, include them in your content, your title tag (and your description).

It is preferable to use strategic keywords in URLs, rather than numbers or elements meaningless. In fact, as I showed in a test published on the WRI, engines take into account the presence of keywords in the URL. By cons, do not expect miracles with this optimization, this criterion is rarely taken into account. In summary: if you can (help you the URL rewriting), use words that make sense in your URL.

For that matter, avoid using certain words in the URL providing too little sense (e.g. articles). But in some cases it is necessary to keep (either because they are important in terms of SEO as in La Rochelle or article is important to make the URL is understandable).

Last advice: do not modify the URLs of your pages solely for the add keywords especially if your listing is already working like that. For new sections of your site or a new site, include keywords from the beginning. For an ancient site, wait the day when you will need to do a major overhaul to integrate this kind of optimization.

Little bonus for AdSense

If the URL contains the keywords associated with the page, AdSense can be used to better target advertisements, especially for the very first displays when the page has been published.

However, it is obviously minor compared to the content of the page...

Word separators in URLs

To properly separate words in URLs, use characters interpreted as delimiters by the search engines. The space is deprecated, use better dash, comma, through the bar (/) or vertical bar, but not underscore (underscore: _). Be careful though with the comma problem in some cases.

Do not rely on the bolding of certain words or phrases in the results pages of Google, management and display of results ranking algorithm results are two separate processes. At a time (circa 2006), Bing (MSN Search at the time) indexait rarely pages whose URL contained more than 2 dashes. The situation seems to have improved since then.

URL length

Length is not a problem for engines that index the very long URLs. By cons, it is not very convenient to use, e.g. when a URL is copied to a forum or blog, it is often truncated to avoid distorting the display. In this case, any keywords that compose may not appear.

I am therefore inclined to advise you to create URL short enough.

The # sign in URL

In a URL, what follows the # sign is traditionally a named anchor, that is to say an internal bookmark the page. Is sometimes referred to as "fragment". This allows for a link to part of a page. For example here is a link to the topic by the # sign to the URL.

Some techs use the sign in another way (this is particularly true of Flex).

Just be aware that for the search engines, everything after the # sign is ignored. If important parameters for displaying the content went behind the # sign, it may be a problem for your SEO. There are exceptions, however now with Google and Ajax indexing.

Extension: Html or. Htm or. Php or. Aspx or no?

What extension should I use? I believe the answer is simple: whatever your file extension! You do not even have to use (see the example of Wikipedia). This is not because it ends with. Html it is an HTML document. What matters is that your page is actually coded in HTML (if possible without too many mistakes!).

Multiple URLs

If a page is accessible at two URLs (or more), there is a risk of duplicate content (duplicate content). If the same content is available in many places, the search engines are trying to determine what is called the canonical URL , that is to say, the URL of the page the more legitimate (e.g. the one that receives more links). They do this while index canonical URL, and do not index the other (e.g., Google has improved its algorithm on this subject since the establishment of BigDaddy). The problem is that it is difficult to predict what URL will be used by the engines. Also have a page accessible to multiple URL is bad also in terms of linking strategies since optimization is scattered on multiple URLs rather than focusing on one. That is why we must be careful not to have multiple URLs for a given page.

In this regard, as shown in SuperPJ comments, if you use the URL Rewriting, do not forget to de-index dynamic pages with the old URL format. For this, it is best to permanently redirect (HTTP code 301) each old URL to the new equivalent. If this is not possible, use the canonical URL tag or robots.txt file. Otherwise, a single page can be accessed at URL which will pose two problems duplicate content.

Accents, diacritical letters and other special characters

While engines like Google usually manage well the special characters in the URL, I do not recommend using. Replace them by their unaccented equivalent; it will save you a lot of trouble.

Capital

Some use capital letters in URL (often with Microsoft tech, I do not know why). Again, what's the use case? What happens if someone tries to access the URL without the capital that you had planned? Sometimes it generates an error, sometimes it returns the same content as the URL with uppercase (but it generates Does not duplicate content?), Sometimes there must be a 301 redirect to the uppercase version.

In short, make it simple; only use lowercase letters in your URL. It is especially to be consistent to always use the same URL format

Other tips

This type of board engine optimization is one of the issues discussed during the workshops on SEO that I regularly within Ranking Metrics. In this case, URL optimization is widely discussed during the day devoted to the optimization of dynamic sites (with detailed explanations of the problems as well as duplicate content URL rewriting).

If I forgot elements to consider for many URL optimize for SEO, or if points are not accurate or more do not hesitate to tell me in the comments, I will try to update this article. Thank you to all those who have played the game and thanks to whom I have already completed my article.