In previous blog posts, we’ve covered a lot of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) aspects, which includes the use of keywords, meta descriptions (these are the descriptive text pieces that appear below a website link in a search engine) Google Maps and even social media. There are all, of course, incredibly important. If you follow the advice I have given you, then you’re definitely on the right path.
What if I were to tell you that there’s something even more fundamental that we haven’t even covered yet. Well, hold your hat – there is! We haven’t yet covered how to structure all the URLs of your website pages, to help search engines and users. I’ve put together a list of eight things that you should bear in mind when structuring the URLs for your website. Don’t worry though, this isn’t a ‘you must do all of these things, or your website will never rank highly’ list. The more you do, the better but as long as you’ve considered some of them, that’s absolutely fine.
#1: Subdomains vs Subfolders – Which is Best?
To understand which is best, we first have to understand what each one is. If you already know, feel free to skip this little bit. If not, I’ll explain it to you now and it’s easiest to do that with an example. Take a look at the options below.
Here, you can tell that a subdomain is an additional part to Peter’s main domain name. It can be created to organise and navigate to different sections of the website. It is a particularly useful strategy for large organisations, where different parts need to control their own website sections, or the different sections are hosted entirely separately. Alternatively, a website can be arranged just as Lois’ website is. Here, the blog is a subfolder of the overall website domain, rather than a separate subdomain of it. Let’s be honest, the way Peter’s website is arranged looks very classy and professional, whereas Lois’ website looks a bit more basic. Which one is better for your SEO rankings though?
As Cloudflare have very eloquently explained, in theory, Google (and of course other search engines) treat subdomains and subdirectories equally. That means each type of strategy has an equal chance of being highly ranked in its own right. However, subdomains have their own key words and are treated as equal but entirely separate from each other, which means that if Peter’s blog becomes very popular, at blog.peterswebsite.com, whilst that will rank highly, it does nothing for his core website, peterswebsite.com. His core website would potentially still rank very low. The more subdomains a website has, the higher the chance that each individual subdomain does not rank highly, due to this keyword dilution, where they are not shared between subdomains. In addition, Peter’s blog posts would not feel as though they are part of his website, since subdomains are treated as equals, rather than having a parent/child relationship.
Alternatively, if Lois’ blog, at loiswebsite.com/blog were to become popular, since it is a child of her parent website domain as a subfolder, then this SEO boost to her blog would automatically boost her root website domain. Subfolders share their keywords and SEO properties and there is also a strong feeling that the blog belongs to her website.
So, when should you use a subdomain compared to a subfolder? Well, if you’re a global company with lots of facets to your business, such as the Walt Disney Company, Disney Store etc., then using subdomains make sense. Each subdomain would be large and easier to maintain if it were separate from the others. Also, if you were a global multinational company, then you could use subdomains to host different language versions of your website, such as deutsch.peterswebsite.com or espanol.peterswebsite.com. After all, keywords and search terms that work well in English wouldn’t work at all in other languages, so having separate subdomains, each with their own keywords, is perfect.
However, if you are a startup, a small business, charity or something similar, you absolutely do not need subdomains. Subfolders would be best for you, for a number of reasons: they are much easier and quicker to maintain, since you only need to perform SEO work once; your main website/domain has more authority, which in turn leads to higher search rankings for your given domain.
#2: Don’t get Carried Away with URL Length
This may seem a little obvious to some but it is important to point it out nevertheless. Generally, the shorter the URL the better. If the URLs for your website max out at around the 60 characters mark, you’re good to go. If they are around 100+ characters long, you might have an opportunity to shorten them.
Don’t worry though, this has absolutely nothing to do with how search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo view your website. If your URLs are over 100+ characters, you won’t likely be penalised at all. It’s more to do with a better user experience for your visitors. Shorter URLs are much easier to read, copy and paste, share on social media etc. This means you’re likely to get more social media exposure, which although won’t affect search rankings much, will certainly help bring more traffic to your website. That’s after all the reason why you’ve created your website. An easy way to start shortening your URLs is to remove what’s known as ‘stop’ words. That’s words like ‘and’ and ‘or’ that just don’t need to be in the URL of your web page.
#3: Avoid having Separate URLs for Web Pages with Similar Content
This is relatively simple. Let’s say your website has two pages with very similar content. You will therefore have two separate URLs that each links to one of these pages. Whilst search engines do not necessarily penalise you for this, the fact that you have duplicate content will mean that by default, the search ranking potential for each of those pages will be diluted, so they won’t appear as highly in search rankings as they could.
You’ve got two options for dealing with this. One is to simply ensure that no two pages on your website are too similar, in terms of either their content or URL address. The other is called ‘canonicalisation’. As Yoast very clearly explains, using a ‘canonical’ tag on a page, such as your homepage, acts a bit like a redirect, so the two similar pages will effectively be merged into one, as far as search engines are concerned. This means that without removing one of the two similar pages, which you might not want to do for many reasons, search engines such as Google will not inadvertently penalise you for having duplicate content.
#4: The More Humans can Understand them, the Better
The more a human (i.e. your website visitor) can read and understand your URL address, the better. Take a look at the illustration below.
It is effectively demonstrating that the more obvious and transparent your URLs are, the better. If it is clear to a user what the web page will be about, from the URL alone, such as the blue section in the illustration, then they are more likely to click on the link and spend time on the web page, as they trust it more. This in turn means your web page will get more visitors and consequently with rank higher in search engines.
Right at the other end of the scale, in the red, you’ve got a URL which just seems like a garbled mess. It doesn’t say anything at all about what the user can expect if they visit the page. That destroys any trust a user might have had and even plants the seed that the user shouldn’t visit the page, incase it is malicious.
The moral of the story is make sure that your URLs are as clear and readable as possible to build trust, increase visits to your website and therefore search rankings.
#5: Avoid using Punctuation and ‘Ugly’ Characters
This relates quite nicely to point #4. With all web page URLs, your aim should be to simplify the URL as much as possible, to make it easy to read. To that end, there are certain characters you want to avoid. There’s an excellent Perishable Press article, which talks about characters you should and shouldn’t use. The table below is a snippet of what they have explained.
Where possible, make sure that you include only safe characters and some unreserved ones, such as the hyphen and the underscore, which can be used to separate words in a URL. Aside from the poor readability that often results from using some of the other characters, these other characters can often ‘break’ certain browsers or search engine crawlers, which means your website might not ranking highly in search rankings, or it might not display properly, even if it is ranked. I’m sure you don’t want that at all.
#6: Be Wary of Case Sensitivity
Some website hosting servers, such as Linux/UNIX-based ones have a nasty habit of interpreting separately upper and lower cases. John Sherrod of Search Discovery wrote a brilliant article explaining this. This effectively means that if your website is hosted on a Linux/UNIX-type server, if a visitor accidentally uses a capital instead of a lower-case letter (or vice versa) they’re most likely to be presented with an error, instead of the web page they wanted to see. Take a look at the illustration below, from John Sherrod’s article.
You’ve got no need to worry about understanding what the different servers are, how they work or any of the technicality of this. You just simply need to bear this in mind: make sure you keep your URLs as simple as possible. If you stick to all lower-case letters, there is much less likely to be any confusion whatsoever. If you mix them, a potential visitor is more likely to type the wrong case, which could post an issue depending on the server.
#7: Try to Include Keywords in your URLs, but Not Too Many!
In a previous blog, I discussed how important it is to include keywords within the text on a web page and even in the meta description that appears below the web address in a search engine, such as Google. It is equally as important to make sure that you include keywords in your URL, since a URL is an equally powerful search ranking factor. Take a look at the image below, which is from my own website.
What you can see is that the URL contains all the right key words, including: blog, social, media and marketing. It is not full of code, or garbled letters, numbers and characters as I have discussed in point #5. In addition, you do not see any key word ‘stuffing’. This is where you might see duplicated key words, or lots of (non-duplicated) key words that don’t make any sense to a user when put together in the URL. You might think that this isn’t an issue but I hate to say that it really is. This not only makes it much nicer for the user to read but it also means that search engines will not penalise you, so the web page in question will rank higher.
#8: Try to Match URLs to Page Titles, when it Makes Sense
As my final point for this blog, it is not motivated by trying to improve search rankings directly. However, matching URLs to page titles does have its benefits. As an example, if you have a web page that has the title “Why Binging on Mars Bars Every Day is Healthy” (please bear in mind I do not actually think binging on sweets and chocolate is healthy at all) something like
besthealthnews.com/binging-mars-bars-every-day-healthy
would be absolutely fine. In addition, so too would
besthealthnews.com/blog/binging-mars-bars-healthy
or many conceivable variations of these. You’ll notice that the ‘stop’ words, such as ‘why’, ‘on’ and ‘is’ have been omitted. They are not necessary to include in your URL at all and if they are included, they will increase the URL length, which can have negative effects, as discussed previously.
The key thing here is that the URL is kept as true to the page title as possible. This achieves a purely human-centric goal, of making it very clear to the user what the web page is likely to be about. This will build trust in your website and therefore could inadvertently improve your search rankings and social media status, as you get more click-throughs to your web pages.
How will Digital Lychee Help You?
If you are simply here to understand how to perfect your website URLs on your own, then I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading my blog and that it helps you. If, however, you are either looking to build a website from scratch, or you are looking for some help to improve the visibility and ranking of your current website, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch now, to find out more. I would love to hear from you!