A Beginner’s Guide On How To Create SEO Friendly Website URLs

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Creating SEO friendly URLs for websites is one of the simplest things to do, but several online marketers overlook this. This is not a good idea, as the URL of your website can either break or make the site. As a result, online marketers should create an SEO-friendly URL for their website. 

The URL of your website should satisfy two essential requirements, and they are as follows. 

  • The URL of your website must tell website visitors where they are on a site
  • It must also help website visitors to understand what the page is all about 

That said, a proper website URL will offer a lot more than just providing information to website visitors. Such a URL will help website designers and search engines to understand your website’s content and organization. This is why it is crucial to learn the tips to create SEO friendly website URL for your site. 

How To Create SEO Friendly Website URLs 

If you are new to the world of SEO and digital marketing, then it is essential to understand that the URL of your site must be structured in such a way that it is friendly to both search engines and internet users. This might seem simple to many online marketers, but you will need to follow the best practices to optimize your website URL properly.

Make Your Website URLs Trustworthy 

Another important thing you need to do is take the essential steps for optimizing the URL to gain website visitors’ trust. Chris Nutbeen from Nuttifox claims that security is one of the critical characteristics of websites. He added that we would make our websites look trustworthy by switching from HTTP to HTTPS. 

If you have secured your website using an SSL certificate, then HTTPS will be at the beginning of the site URL and not HTTP. SSL certificate will protect your website from cyber and hacker attacks. These digital certificates will also help you by encrypting the data sent back and forth between the server and end-user. 

Google has been considering HTTPS as an essential ranking factor since 2014. So, if you are still running your site on HTTP, you should consider investing in the right kind of SSL certificate to upgrade your website to HTTPS. Suppose you own a webshop with multiple first-level subdomains such as payments, blogs, product pages under the main domain. In that case, you should consider investing in wildcard SSL like RapidSSL wildcard, Comodo Positive Wildcard SSL, Thawte wildcard as these are few good options you can try for a website. With this single certificate, you will be able to secure an unlimited number of level-one subdomains under the chosen primary domain at an affordable cost.

Nutbeen added that websites that collect info from website visitors and those who sell goods online must be safe. If such websites are not secure, then Google Chrome and other browsers will warn website visitors that the site is not safe. This will have a negative impact on user experience, which will also hurt SEO rankings.

Create Readable And Clean URLs 

When creating a URL for your website, you will need to make sure that website visitors can easily digest it in a single glance. This is one of the primary reasons you must avoid including date fragments like day, month, and year unless the content is time-critical. 

Peter Thaleikis from RankLetter advises website admins and online marketers to avoid experiments and stick to characters like 0-9, A-Z, and dash (-) when creating URLs for websites. Thaleikis also suggests digital marketers should include the keyword with the URL of your website. 

BrandExtract’s Chris Wilks also states that the URL of a website should be readable. He admits that having URLs with popular search terms and keywords is good. However, he claims that including keywords in the URL is not an important guideline that needs to be followed. 

Nevertheless, Chris Wilks added that the focus should be on creating readable and clear URLs. In other words, the key is to create consistent, readable, and clean URLs. If you include keywords in the URL, it should be done naturally.

Focus On Writing Memorable URLs 

Creating easily recognizable or memorable URLs will enable you to offer a better user experience to website visitors. For example, if you have created a blog post on best Instagram captions, it is best to use a URL like “the website address + best-instagram-captions”. 

Several online marketers and website admins choose long URLs for such blog posts, which might read something like ‘website address+best-instagram-captions-for-small-businesses-recommended-by-experts’. Such a URL will fail to remain less memorable to website visitors when compared to the first one. 

Voice’s Rebecca Lajoie-Dyck recommends that online marketers use lowercase words separated by hyphens when creating a URL. She also states that it is best to use terms relevant to the content of the webpage. It is also best to avoid special characters, codes, and ID numbers from the URL. 

Larry Ludwig from Ludwig Media Inc claims that it is best to create an easy-to-remember and short URL from the blog or web page’s headline. Larry stresses that the URL should not contain any stop words, year, or other elements, which might not make it evergreen.

Keep URLs Short 

As we discussed earlier, you will need to create memorable, easy to read, consistent, and clean URLs. Another essential tip that you will need to remember while creating SEO-friendly URLs is to make them short. Keeping URLs short might help you with your SEO strategy. 

Sasha Quail, from Claims UK, claims that short URLs will surely help you dominate the search engine results. It is crucial to note that shorter URLs are more likely to get a higher rank on Google’s search engine results page compared to longer URLs. 

Quail advises online marketers and website owners to keep URLs as short as possible. Sasha also states that the character length of URLs should be between 50 to 60 characters. 

Tom Zsomborgi from Kinsta also favors short URLs over longer ones. Tom states that the URL structure of websites will impact their SEO rankings. He also added that it is best to include the focus keyword in the URL and avoid using special characters like emojis in the URL.

Ensure That The Blog Title Is Not Your URL 

Most of you would have probably seen URLs that are the same as the title of a blog post. The primary issue with following such an approach is that you will add overly long URLs full of stop words like and, an, a, and others. 

Stop words will make URLs unnecessarily long. Megan Imhoff, who is from Always Relevant Digital, advises online marketers to use a short URL that is just a few words long. However, you will need to make sure that the URL will make sense to users if you update the published blog post. 

Wrapping Up 

Always remember that the title of your blog should not be the URL. SEO-friendly URLs must be memorable, evergreen, consistent, and short. It would help if you tried to achieve the characteristics mentioned above when optimizing URLs. Also, focus on including the primary keyword in the URL, as it will help you with your SEO efforts in the long run. 

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