5 Reasons Why An SEO Friendly URL Structure Is Important

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is extremely important to the success of your website, especially in the earlier stages of building an online presence. However, if you’re not careful with your URL structure, you could accidentally be hurting your SEO rather than helping it. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your URLs are SEO friendly and easy to read at the same time. Here are 5 reasons why an SEO friendly URL structure is important!

What Are SEO Friendly URLs?

As a digital marketing company, we often get asked by clients what are SEO  friendly URLs and how they can improve their website’s search engine rankings. We explain that search engines such as Google view web pages in two different ways; bots and humans. The bot looks at certain elements of a web page to determine its relevance for each search query typed into Google’s search bar. These bots will crawl through your website looking for relevant information on your site. When it comes to finding quality content, these bots are not only interested in page rank (backlinks) but also whether or not you are using an SEO friendly URL structure.

  1. Easier Indexing 

As we all know that search engines typically don’t index every page on a website, it’s important to make sure that your site pages are easily indexed and relatively easy to identify by both users and search engines. A good rule of thumb for sites with less than 1,000 total pages is three or fewer levels deep in directories. Sites with more than 1,000 pages may want to follow a suite, but adding more levels in certain instances may be needed, for example, if there are a lot of sub-categories. Just keep it at one extra level maximum beyond what you have already established as your main directory level. From Google: We recommend having no more than four directory levels from which content can be directly accessed through links.

  1. Less Chance of Broken Links 

As search engines crawl your site, there’s a chance they will find a broken link that could affect your rankings. Be sure to keep track of where you are linking and what types of pages you’re linking to (home page, category, subcategory or specific product page). You can also use tools like Google Webmaster Tools to get a good idea of how many broken links there are on your site.

  1. No Branded Keywords in URLs 

One of the most common mistakes we see companies make when they are just starting out with their digital marketing strategy is to stuff their branded keywords into URLs. For example, let’s say you run a taco restaurant in St. Louis called La Taco Grande and you have named your company La Taco Grande Digital Marketing Company.

  1. Sitemaps Are Simpler 

When you own a business, it can be easy to get bogged down in various tasks. When you build your own site’s URLs, you could spend time implementing sitemaps rather than getting stuck into other duties that are just as important. A professional digital marketing company will save you time by creating clean and simple URLs that are also optimized for search engines. This way, your site’s pages will show up quickly in search results, increasing traffic to your website.

  1. Cleaner Backlinks

By choosing keywords for your URLs that accurately describe each page’s content, you’re also making it easier for search engines to parse and understand what your pages are about. This makes it easier for them to determine where each page should be placed in their rankings.

We hope now you know why an SEO friendly URL structure is important for your website!


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