SEO URL Structure & File Naming

Many web site owners fail to realize that the URL of an individual page can affect how much search engine traffic it receives. Like titles and keywords, URL structure is an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Read on to learn more about the best practices for creating an SEO based URL structure…

Putting related search keywords in the URL will help improve a page’s ranking. However, it is best to separate these words so that search engine “spiders” (a.k.a. “robots”) can distinguish between them; otherwise, it just looks like one long word. Some people use underscore (_) symbols in between the keywords, but using a hyphen (-) is generally considered preferable for SEO. If the page has content people are likely to revisit regularly – such as updated news or weather – consider creating a page with a short, easy to remember URL (perhaps a subdomain) which redirects to the long URL. Make sure the longer address is linked to from the “Site Map”.

Using a long URL structure generally isn’t a problem with regard to SEO; search engines will still index very long (over 100 letters) URLs, and most web browsers can handle addresses which are thousands of characters long. Nonetheless, excessively long URLs are less appealing for people to use in print or email. There is no need to repeat words already used in the URL; don’t use a word in the filename that repeats the domain, directory, or subdomain name. The same applies to the page’s title and “keywords” META tag, but not the body/text of the page, where SEO keywords should be used several times.

As an example of applying these best practices to the structure of a specific URL, the file name for a page selling portable computers might be cheap-laptop-notebook-computer. The entire address would be something like www.example.com/shopping/cheap-laptop-notebook-computer.htm. Changing the directory name “shopping” to “buy” would best target keywords people are likely to search for. On some search engines, text files (.TXT format) are listed with the URLs as their titles; others use the first line of text for this purpose. The same goes for documents in PDF format.

When a web page’s file name is oriented to SEO, it will have a better chance of gaining high rankings in search results – especially if other efforts are made to optimize it. To be SEO friendly, a file name should do each of the following:

1.Contain keywords that people search for (the words must also be relevant to the page’s content)
2.Separate the keywords, preferably with hyphens (-); see the example below.
3.Avoid repeating words in the rest of the URL, like domain or directory names.
This is not really all that difficult to implement. Here are some examples of SEO friendly web page file names:

•pascal-programming-books.htm
•used-motorcycles-los-angeles.htm
•get-better-tv-reception.shtml
•charlotte-nc-weather-report.asp
•easy-microwave-recipes.php
Hyphens separate the words so that search engines can individually recognize them, rather than seeing them as one long, unintelligible word. Some sites use otherpunctuation, but hyphens are the most SEO friendly. If your web site already has dozens or hundreds of pages, it is probably best to start using these file names on new pages, but to leave the existing pages as they are.

On the other hand, if your site only has a few pages, it might be worthwhile to change their file names. However, the old pages ought to be removed and your site should be set to redirect users from the old URLs to the new. Search engines don’t look favorably on duplicate pages, and you also don’t want users who have “bookmarked” the pages not to be able to return.

Basically, the best practices for creating an SEO oriented URL structure include using keywords (or phrases) people search for, separating each word with a hyphen, and avoiding repetitive URLs. Applying these practices isn’t difficult, and has the potential to substantially increase traffic