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Do You Need To Focus On Optimizing Your URL Structure?

By SEOPartner

Source: http://www.quicksprout.com/2015/04/06/does-url-structure-even-matter-a-data-driven-answer

A common SEO issue often neglected by web masters is poor URL structure. Some say that optimizing your permalinks to be “SEO friendly” is just a waste of time and doesn’t have an impact on rankings. Others would testify that although it doesn’t help much in rankings compared to link building, optimizing it can make it easier for search engines to index your site.

Optimizing your URL structure

Optimizing your URL structure

Extraneous characters
– According to Google, it’s best practice to use dashes over underscores because it affects how keywords in the URL are read by search engines. ex. “search-engine” is to “search engine” while “search_engine” is to “searchengine”

Length of URL
– Research shows that search listings are dominated by URLs that contain 35 to 40 characters. Keep in mind that URLs have a very minimal effect on rankings compared to backlinks.

Adding keywords on your URLs
– Avoid stuffing keywords on URLs since Google already downplayed the effect of keywords on URLs as a ranking factor

Subfolders
– From a usability standpoint, it’s recommended to use the least amount of subfolders on your website hierarchy.

In conclusion, backlinks still has a lot of impact with regard to ranking positions. You do not need to focus on URLs as long as they are don’t impact users and site performance.

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How To Structure Your URLs In 15 Easy Steps

By SEOPartner

Source: http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

Site URLs and domain names are one of the few basic principles of Search Engine Optimization. This serves as a guide in optimizing your permalinks to increase effectiveness of how Google crawls your pages.

15 ways to structure your URL

15 ways to structure your URL

  1. Use a single domain & sub domain – your blog and your site can perform better everything is part of the root domain.
  2. Make URLs readable – increase click through rate for optimized URLs
  3. Place keywords in URLs – URL is also considered by searchers when clicking a site
  4. Avoid multiple URLs with the similar content – user 301 redirect or rel=canonical to avoid split ranking signals
  5. Exclude dynamic parameters when possible – avoid URL parameters to increase click volume
  6. Shorter URLs are better – increase user experience by limiting the amount of characters on URLs (less than 100)
  7. Make sure that your titles and URLs match – aim for similarities between URLs and your page titles
  8. Including stop words isn’t necessary
  9. Remove/control for unwieldy punctuation characters – avoid hard to read characters on URLs
  10. Limit redirection hops to two or fewer – browsers are slowed down due to long redirect strings
  11. Fewer folders is generally better
  12. Avoid hashes in URLs unless absolutely essential
  13. Be wary of case sensitivity – you’d want URLs automatically redirect to the correct URLs when the wrong case is used (ex. /example.htm and /ExaMplE.htm)
  14. Use Hyphens and underscores for word separators
  15. Avoid keyword stuffing on URLs

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