Having SEO-Friendly URL Structures: URL Optimization

What determines exactly where you are in the internet world? Let’s say it right away: your address, that is, your URL. The URLs of websites are closely related to their SEO compatibility -we will say SEO-friendly URL structures to them. A strong on-page technical SEO optimization requires you to optimize the URL on every page of the website. Yes, just like that. We will explain the basic rules of optimization in detail in this content.

We have prepared a checklist of everything you need to do to have SEO-friendly URL structures. We are sure that when you study and follow the checklist, you will be able to collect stronger scores from technical SEO audits, folks!

Many people think that URLs are unnecessary and dysfunctional website domains. However, it is possible to say that URLs have very important tasks for SEO ranking. By editing your URLs, you can have a more organized and crawlable website, and you can easily navigate your content. If you want to learn more about the topic, let’s get started right away.

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Optimizing URLs for SEO: Ultimate Checklist

It can be a great idea to optimize the url structures on your site for SEO. Remember, URLs affect your ranking so you have to pay attention to them.

Make Sure The URL Is Readable: SEO-Friendly URL Structures

Did you know that both search engine bots and users crawl your URL to understand what is there on your site? Therefore, you should not create a URL with symbolic values ​​that cannot be understood by anyone. Customizing the words in the URL or using dynamic URLs will not work well for SEO. Therefore, all you have to do is show search engines what is here with the keywords in the URL. Just like we did with the h1, h2 tags. We try to do exactly the same with URLs.

Let’s go with an example. Let’s imagine you are a store that sells colorful mugs. The URL for a product you sell should be as follows:

http://yourdomain.com/yellow-mug-for-coffee

So, how does the URL display get wrong? As follows:

http://yourdomain.com/index.php?=5694468=t44=?p=987

So now you understand that you should have a URL that points directly to your products or content instead of being specialized numbers or words.

Your Content Should Be Organized in a Hierarchical Order

Your content and web pages must be organized in a hierarchical order. How you organize your URL gives search engines a lot of information about the hierarchical importance of pages. This closely determines what authority your pages will get indexed in the SERP. Try categorizing your URLs as follows.

Basic categories are more likely to be shown on the SERP because they have higher authority. Child categories under basic categories have less authority. Therefore, you need to organize all of the pages on your website accordingly using a detailed sitemap. For example, there are three URLs below. The first of these URLs will be the highest authority, the second the lower authority, and the last one the least authoritative.

http://yourdomain.com/yellow-mug

http://yourdomain.com/category/yellow-mug

http://yourdomain.com/category/subcategory/yellow-mug

Don’t Use Capital Letters In The Structure Of Your URLs

The structure of your URLs should have an appearance that screen readers can easily read and understand. Otherwise, it may be more difficult to make sense of and rank URLs for both readers and search engines. For this, you have to follow the rules of the internet world. Be careful not to use capital letters in your URLs in any way. Note, for example, that you should prefer the next one instead of a URL like:

http://yourdomain.com/Yellow-Mug

http://yourdomain.com/yellow-mug

Decide Correctly How to Separate the Words in the URL

Sometimes the URL of a web page can consist of many words. This is not considered a problem unless the URL is too long. But listing words one after another, with nothing in between, completely eliminates the reader’s understandability of URLs, and search engine bots cannot understand what do URLs mean correctly. This situation affects ranking very negatively.

Remember, each word in URLs is a keyword for your site and contributes to Google’s understanding of what that page is about. In this case, we tell you what sign you should separate the words in the URL: With a hyphen. Do not use underscores instead of hyphens, hyphens are always a better choice for your ranking. Because Googlebots is designed to detect hypens, not underscores.

• What you need to do is as follows:

http://yorudomain.com/yellow-mug

• The example below is a negative example:

http://yourdomain.com/yellow_mug

Do Not Use Mdot For Your Web Pages

Mobile-first indexing tells you something quite important: Mobile versions of the pages on your website will now be considered by Google as primary pages. Your desktop pages will be a version of them.

But how?

Let’s say right away: Since the last updates of Google, mobile-friendly pages get much higher ranking in SERP, while non-mobile-friendly pages are immediately eliminated from the ranking. Many of the experts working on SEO-Friendly URL Structures say that mobile responsive URLs should not be added to the sitemap: That is, you should get rid of mdot and if you have any, you should use 301 redirect to link them to the standard URL of the page. While mobile-first indexing are applied to all of the websites now, you have to care about the requirements. Do not miss that all of your design, theme and other details have to be mobile responsive.

Include Your Keywords in Your URLs

While we say that your URLs directly affect your ranking, we’re not just talking about strong URLs that are technically flawless. Semantically, we are talking about URLs that refer to the content of your website and contain specific target keywords.

Here’s a little warning: Domain and URL are completely different things. Domain is the first part of the URL and determines your site’s address. The URL also includes the part that continues in the extension of the domain in question. Your domain does not need to contain a specific keyword. Consider the largest e-commerce site in the world: It’s called Amazon. So if you look at it, it has nothing to do with the work it does and the domain of the site, right?

If you wish, consider the world’s largest video sharing platform: Youtube. It doesn’t contain any keywords indicating that it contains videos, right?

We are talking about exactly that. The word in the domain does not have to contain keywords directly. However, the fact that the URL that describes a page contains keywords that characterize that page will definitely affect the rankings.

Using a URL like http://yourdomain.com/yellow-mug is fine. But if you use a URL like the following when selling yellow mug, that would be a wrong choice:

http://yourdomain.com/furniture

Choose Not to Use Date Phrases in Your URL

If you’ve posted a piece of content on your website and it has a year or date in the title, that’s fine. Because this type of URL often convinces Google and search engine bots that you are providing up-to-date information. However, even if you are using this type of title, we strongly recommend that you do not include the word indicating the date or year in the URL.

If you include a date in your URL, it will need to be updated annually for it to be updated. It would be wiser to use a URL that has no year information indefinitely, rather than a URL that is updated every year. For example, the first URL we give below gives much more effective results than the second:

http://yourdomain.com/best-SEO-tips

http://yourdomain.com/best-SEO-tips-2021

Now we know the reason much better, right?

Need To Use Slash or Not?

We know what the slash sign is, right? The most recent statements by The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) say that using the slash flag to identify parent and child categories in a URL is a pretty valid method.

But what exactly does the relationship we call parent and child categories tell? Let’s say it right: Sometimes your website can have more than one web page in a given category. For example, suppose the category on a website is cakes. Under this category, there may be many subcategories and web pages such as ” cakes for children ”, ” cakes for grown ups ”, ” cakes for birthdays ”. In this case, the basic category should be separated by slash signs and refer to the child category.

For example, at the following URL, you can see that there is a subcategory cakes for children under the cakes category:

http://yourdomain.com/cakes/cakes-for-children

Using Slash At The End of The URLs

But that’s not just the case. A 2017 statement says there is a pretty significant difference between using a slash at the end of a web page’s URL and not using it. According to Google’s John Mueller tweet, the following URL refers to the domain within the homepage:

http://yourdomain.com/cakes

But the URL below represents a different category independent of the homepage:

http://yourdomain.com/cakes/

So now we know better than before what it means to use slash in the URL. Here is the tweet we are talking about:

However, this rule is not too harsh. For example, even Google’s own sites have category pages that do not comply with this rule. You can see a category page URL below that does not fit the rules:

https://developers.google.com/analytics

As you can notice, there is no slash at the end of the URL. But this is still a category page.

The following is an example of a web page:

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/integrate

In the examples above, you see two URLs with no slash at the end. But while one of them belongs to the category, one is the web page. There is no structural difference between them. This makes us think that Google is not very pushy on the use of slashes.

Is URL a Ranking Factor?

Statements made by Google employees from past to present tell us a lot about the role of URLs in the ranking. It is accepted by Google and many experts that URLs are a ranking factor. However, it is possible to say that the effect of this factor is underestimated in many tweets posted. Let’s take a look at a tweet posted by Mueller in 2018, stating that URLs do not have much effect on Google SERPs:

This tweet says URLs are important, neither to users nor to Googlebots. He even claims that they are “invisible”.

Whether Keywords in Bare URL Links Used as Anchor Text

If a user shares your site’s link somewhere without using an anchor text, would the words in the URL be seen as keywords and affect your site’s ranking positively?

Links created without using any anchor text are called naked links. They are not hidden in an anchor text, they are seen directly in their simplest form. For example, while a bare URL is yourwebsite.com, the anchor text can be “Click here” and those who click on this word go to the site in question.

According to a statement made by Mueller in 2020, in this case, the keywords in the URL are not considered as anchors and do not contribute to the ranking. The URL is seen only as a link, without any context specified.

Can Correct Usage of URL Affect CTR Rate in SERP?

Snippets found on the results pages of search engines also contain your URL. First your URL, then your meta title, and then the meta description will be shown to users in SERP. If available, Google Structured Data will also be included in your page view in the SERP.

So, is there any chance that the URL you use affects CTR rates? Actually not much. Because although the URLs appear in the SERP, they actually appear to be shortened and Google will show you the continuation of it if you click the arrow on the right. Because URLs do not have much of a function in SERP. So it would be wrong to say that URLs are a good weapon to fight your opponents in the SERP.

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