What Does a Good SEO URL Structure Look Like?
Is your website’s URL structure helping or hurting you? Having a good SEO URL structure is one of the top 3 fundamental items you need in order to have a successful SEO campaign. I can not emphasis the importance of this enough. This is akin to the foundation your house sits on. Do you want it made of a flimsy material or a solid one? I’ll personally will take the solid one every time.
Let’s get back to basics and just talk plainly about 1 of the 3 SEO fundamentals that can boost your website’s presence, and allow you to better reach your target audience(s). No hocus-pocus, no green curtains, just straight talk between you and me. Copasetic?
Why is a SEO URL Structure important?
Your URLs mean everything to search engines. It helps them classify your content by placing things in groupings or categories.
Think of it this way. When you go to the grocery store and you need bananas where do you go? The produce section right? And within the produce section you seek out the fruit section.
Your URL structure tells Google that you are writing about produce, fruit actually and bananas specifically. An example of a good SEO URL structure for this example would be:
- www.mywebsite.com/produce/fruit/bananas
Having a proper SEO URL structure is important because Google isn’t human. It relies on classification to understand content. URL structure is simply just classification.
So, if your content is cleanly classified then Google can read it more easily and will be more inclined to reward you by showing your website’s content higher on a search results page.
I know you are thinking this is great and dandy, but how can I tell if my URL needs to be cleaned up? This is actually really easy. 🙂 Here are some examples of bad URLs:
- http://www.yourwebsite.com/article.php/3831706/
- http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/?offset=1369807235000&tag=produce+banana
A good rule of thumb is, if you as a human can’t read it, then what shot does a computer have?
This is what your URLs should look like:
- http://www.yourwebsite.com/page-title
- http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/blog-title
Hopefully I have now demystified SEO URL structures for you. They are ridiculously important for the health and success of your website. Please feel free to ask as many questions as you like in the comments below.
How to Talk to Your IT Department
You will need help from your IT department to clean up your messy URLs. It’s completely OK to refer to them as “messy URLs.”
In the examples above, which are the most common, the easiest way to correct this is to follow this structure:
- Website = domain name/page title
- Blog = domain name/blog category/blog title.
It’s just that simple.
The last thing you need to talk to your IT people about is when they make these changes to your URLs that they ABSOLUTELY need to “implement a 301 re-direct” for each and every URL they change.
What this means in non-Tech speak is you need to tell Google that your address has changed and to please forward the mail to the new address. The messy URL is your old house, and the new clean URL is your brand new one.
This can be done one-by-one or done as a bulk edit. The amount of URLs actually needing to be fixed will dictate which method is smarter to use.
Implementing 301 redirects is equally as important as fixing your messy URLs because if you don’t let Google know you moved, you are creating duplicate content. This is extremely bad, and will significantly hurt your SEO efforts.
Conclusion
To end with one final house analogy. It would akin to sending out party invitations to your new house warming party where half of your guests are told to go to your old address and the other half are told to go to your new address. That’s not a party that sounds all too much fun to host.
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