Source: http://www.oncrawl.com/10-tips-to-optimize-your-urls
In every business, URLs are important in order to help clients find their website easily. However, there are cases when business owners make mistakes in creating URLs due to their insufficient knowledge. Below are some tips to enhance your URLs.
URLs must be readable by everyone – It is important to ensure that readers and search engines can easily read your URL to help them remember it properly and avoid confusion from the others.
Organize your content – It is essential to categorize your URLs in order to clearly determine and show to search engines which URL should get a little boost in the SERPs.
Do not use capital – Never use capital letters since it can confuse search engines and readers as it can make it more difficult to understand.
Prefer hyphens to underscores – Making use of hyphens to separate words is recommended since Google robots are set up to read hyphens and not underscores.
Add your mobile URLs to a sitemap – Adding your mobile URL can inform search engines which web pages are mobile friendly and which one are not.
Include your target keyword – It is also imperative to include your primary keyword in your URLs.
Block unsafe URLs with robots.txt – It also a must to block unsafe URLs since bad URLs can get you penalized by search engines if they index duplicate URLs
Canonicalize your URLs – Using canonical URLs can be used if you want a specific URL become the preferred one even if other ones direct to the same content.
Don’t forget 301 redirect for broken URLs – You need to implement 301 redirect on the old URL place to notify Google bots your new URL destination.
Add a favicon – This icon next to your URL in browser helps recognize your website brand better.