When was the last time you took a closer look at the URLs of your website?
Most businesses that focus on optimizing their websites for search engines often overlook URL structures. But in reality, clear, descriptive, and well-structured URLs matter greatly in SEO and their website’s overall performance.
For website visitors, the URLs act as a roadmap that guides them seamlessly through the website and ensures that they don’t get lost along the way. On the other hand, Consistent URL structures make it easier for your website to manage a large volume of content, contributing to its scalability.
Due to their crucial role, the best search engine optimization companies prioritizes creating properly optimized URLs that meet the highest search engine optimization standards.
As we proceed in this blog, we are going to learn more about URL structuring and its importance in SEO. You will also get to take a look at some of the best practices that SEO expert services employ for effective URL structuring for scalable websites.
Understanding URL Structure in SEO
Uniform Resource Locator or URL represents an address for a unique resource (such as a page on your website) on the internet. An SEO-friendly URL structure refers to the format and composition of a web page’s address. The structure of a URL contains different components, such as protocol, domain, subdomain, etc.
The URL structure of a website depends on the unique needs of the website. For example, the URL structure of an e-commerce website will be different from a government website URL structure. Depending on the purpose of the website, the best SEO service in India maintains a proper structure of the URLs.
Why is URL Structuring in SEO Important?
URL structuring plays a significant role in on-page search engine optimization (SEO). While it is quite important in making your website navigable for users, URLs are also a significant ranking factor for Google’s algorithm. According to Backlinko, URL length is at number 46 in Google’s top 200 ranking factors for websites.
Keeping that in mind, here are some notable reasons why the best SEO agency in India considers URL structuring important in SEO:
User Experience
The best SEO service providers in India emphasize URL structuring because well-optimized URLs make navigation easier for users. They help the user to backtrack their journey and find related content without getting lost. This ease of navigation offers a better user experience and keeps users engaged.
Rankings
One of the primary motives of practising SEO is to rank a website higher on search engine result pages (SERPs), and URL structures contribute to these rankings. As discussed earlier, URL structures act as a ranking factor for search engines, and thus, ensuring well-structured URLs is important to claim that top spots.
Page Crawling and Indexing
Clear and descriptive URLs help the search engines understand a page’s topic, content, and relevance, making it easier for them to crawl and index the page in their database. Proper indexing is important for making your website recognizable to search engines, ensuring it ranks well while avoiding any indexing issues.
Website Scalability
A lesser-known fact about URL structuring is that it greatly impacts the scalability of a website. According to the best SEO company in India, pages with well-structured and optimized URLs can easily handle greater amounts of content. Also, your website can seamlessly handle a large number of users with consistent URLs.
Backlinks
Simple and comprehensive URLs create opportunities for you to earn high-quality backlinks from external sites. The best search engine optimization service in India keeps URLs short and simple to place them directly into the content without using any anchor text, driving even more backlinks. The more backlinks you get, the better your pages will rank.
Best Practices for Effective URL Structuring
The role of URL structuring in defining the success of SEO is definitely unmissable. However, effective URL structuring for SEO requires dedicated efforts, time, and experience. It is the reason why most businesses prefer to partner with the best SEO agency in India to optimize their website’s URLs.
Let’s take a look at some of the best practices that the best SEO service providers in India use for effective URL structuring for scalable websites:
Keep URLs Short and Descriptive
A good rule of thumb for URL structuring is to keep them short and to the point. To render properly in all browsers, the URL length must be only up to 2,083 characters, but you should aim to keep it much shorter than this limit. Also, the URLs must be on point and clearly describe the page’s content and relevance.
Include HTTPS Protocols
The HTTPS protocol is a safer version of the HTTP protocol as it ensures encrypted communication between the website and the browser. The best SEO agency in India recommends that all websites must use HTTPS in their URL structure because it makes the website credible for both users and search engines.
Use Relevant Keywords
Using your primary keyword in a page’s URL is as important as using that in the content. Google considers the use of a focus keyword in the URL as a ranking factor. Apart from the ranking factor, the primary keyword in the URL also makes it easier for users to understand what that page is about.
Add Hyphens Between Keywords
As the URL structure does not include spaces between keywords, you can use hyphens (-) to separate the words in the URL. Using hyphens in your URLs tells search engines exactly where the spaces between the words are. Also, it makes the URL easily readable for the website visitors.
Avoid Using Stop Words and Special Characters
Google never likes the use of stop words and special characters in URL structures. This is because stop words (like a, and, the, for, an, as, to, etc) and special characters (such as !, @, #, %, etc) do not add any value to a URL and make it difficult to read. Thus, SEO expert services avoid using these in the URL structure.
Use only Lowercase Letters
Using only lowercase letters for URLs is considered the preferred SEO-friendly method for URL structuring. This is because URLs are case-sensitive for everything that comes after the domain name. Also, users don’t pay attention to capitalization when typing their URLs. Thus, it is better to use only lowercase letters.
Stick to Google’s Guidelines
Google has its own set of recommended guidelines for URL structuring. Google favours the use of simple, descriptive words in URLs, localized words if applicable, and UTF-8 encoding for non-ASCII characters. Adhering to these guidelines can help you easily create well-optimized, SEO-friendly URLs for your website.
Concluding Thoughts
Crafting well-structured and optimized URLs for your website is the key to success for your SEO efforts. With SEO-friendly URL structuring, you unlock your website’s full potential to drive increased visibility, rank higher on search result pages, offer an unmatched user experience, and ensure seamless scalability.
Using the most effective practices we have mentioned, you can start your journey to effective URL structuring with ease. In case you want to take things to the next level, partnering with the best SEO company in India can always be the best option for you. Structure your URLs today and watch your SEO game soar!