With URL's keep it simple.
Make your URL's easy to understand.
By making your site URL's easy to understand, you effectively do three things at once.
First of all, you help yourself keep your site better organised and make it easier to understand where a certain page is and also what the page will contain. Secondly, just as you are helping yourself navigate your own site, you make it easier for users to know where they are within your website. This avoids users from being confused by long cryptic URL's that contain a lot of unrecognisable letters or numbers. If users wanted to link your site to another person, it would be easier for them to remember a relevant word than a lot of nonsensical letters and numbers.
First of all, you help yourself keep your site better organised and make it easier to understand where a certain page is and also what the page will contain. Secondly, just as you are helping yourself navigate your own site, you make it easier for users to know where they are within your website. This avoids users from being confused by long cryptic URL's that contain a lot of unrecognisable letters or numbers. If users wanted to link your site to another person, it would be easier for them to remember a relevant word than a lot of nonsensical letters and numbers.
Lastly and, in regards to getting your site high in a search results, most importantly is that having your URL's easy to understand and descriptive, it helps search engine "crawlers" navigate your site, which in turn gives them more vital information regarding each page. So it really is in your best interest to have your URL's simple and descriptive.
http://www.alansusedautos.com/folder3/09666a/x3/00012m.htm
The example above shows how not to structure your URL[red highlighted area]. This would make it hard for people and search engines to navigate, only causing problems for yourself. You'd be best suited to structure it like the one below.
http://www.alansusedautos.com/toyota/corolla/spare_parts/front_lights.htm
Remember that URL's are displayed in the search results too.
Just like the topics I discussed in my last two posts, URL's are displayed in a users search results, the same way the title and snippet are. i.e. the <title> tag and <meta> tags.
Spending a bit of time making your URL's user friendly will yield great results. If you keep them simple but effective, whatever a user is searching for, a helpful URL will always be of great benefit to you both. There is a very helpful page created by Google Webmasters which I would recommend reading to help better understand the best ways to structure your sites URL's.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329.
Additional tips to better URL's.
Spending a bit of time making your URL's user friendly will yield great results. If you keep them simple but effective, whatever a user is searching for, a helpful URL will always be of great benefit to you both. There is a very helpful page created by Google Webmasters which I would recommend reading to help better understand the best ways to structure your sites URL's.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329.
Additional tips to better URL's.
- Use words in URL's but avoid making them too lengthy.
- Create a simple site directory, making it simple for users to know where they are within your site.
- This may sound silly, but have only one URL per page to avoid confusion between users. The best way to fix this if you have more than one URL for a page is a "301 redirect". This in essence redirects users from un-used URL's to the preferred URL. More information on which can be found here. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633.
Thanks again for reading and I'm back tomorrow for a post on Site Navigation.
-Conor.
-Conor.
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