When it comes to websites and SEO, every little aspect of your website matters. Even the URL structure of your websites can be optimised for SEO purposes. Here are 5 best SEO practices you could use for your URL structure:
- Domain/Subdomain
One of the best SEO practices would be to use a single domain and different subdomains. If necessary, users can try moving content from subdomains into subfolders instead. This is a good way to keep your structures organised and increase the chances of having search engines rank not only your parent domain but content on your subdomains as well.
- URLS + Title tags
Whenever possible, try to match up both your URL structure and the title tag of your content for better SEO purposes. It does not have to be a perfect match all the time, partial matches or variations work as well, as long as essential structures and keywords are addressed. This simple SEO practice not only benefits your indexing of the relevant pages, it also helps on a more personal level as web users who came across your page URL will gain a better idea on what to expect your content is, thereby reducing bounce rate. Specific URLs also look a great deal more professional.
- Redirection
One of the SEO practices professionals often advice would be to limit redirections to two or fewer hops. Redirecting with two or more hops can still be followed by search engines, but are typically not prized in a sense that the relevancy of your overall website may be affected from it. This also tends to slow down the loading speed of your website, which can cause your bounce rate to further suffer so do make sure to keep and limit redirection hops on your website.
- Case sensitivity
Make sure that case sensitivity is not a problem when it comes to your URL structure. The last thing you want to do is to have your users directed into a completely different site just because of the case sensitivity. This could potentially destroy your reputation as a professional corporation if you are not careful. Make sure to test and redirect if you have to.
- Keyword stuffing
Refrain from keyword stuffing as best as possible. It’s natural to want to include your keywords as much as possible since that’s what the search engine ranks you on. However, placing in too much keywords, repeated words, can make your content and URL structure unnecessarily worded. It will also cause Google or other site crawlers to penalise your website as spam. This would cost your search ranking position big time and it’s not easy to gain your positioning back if you’ve dropped drastically. Create strong keyword inclusive URLs but take heed not to overdo the keyword inclusion and word your contents organically.
These are the 5 SEO practices that you are encouraged to follow not only for your URL structure but for your website as a whole. SEO when done right, can boost you up through the search engine rankings but you need to know what you are doing. Otherwise, you may just thwart your own chances of succeeding.
