When you’re creating a website, one of the most important things to keep in mind is how to make your URLs SEO friendly. This means that you want your webpages to have URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.
There are a few things you can do to make sure your URLs are as SEO friendly as possible.
1. Keep them short and sweet. The shorter the URL, the easier it is for both users and search engines to understand and remember.
2. Use keywords. Make sure the keywords you want to target are included in your URLs. This will help improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
3. Use hyphens to separate words. This will help ensure that your URLs are readable and that search engines can index them properly.
4. Use descriptive titles. Your URLs should accurately reflect the title of the webpage they’re linking to. This will help users and search engines understand the content of the page.
There are two reasons for rewriting your URLs. The first is related to Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engines are much more at ease with URLs that do not contain long query strings.
Clean URLs, allow search engines to differentiate folder names and can also create real links to keywords.
Query strings appended to URLs are often considered hindrances when a search engine attempts to index.
Another reason to rewrite your sites URLs is to increase usability to your site’s end users and ease of maintenance for your webmaster.
Clean URLs are much easier to remember, rather than URLs that contain a bunch of parameters and characters.
The code of URL rewriting is actually setting a “system” on the host server that will allow it (i.e. the server) to know how to understand the new URL format.
When deciding to rewrite the URLs of your site, you will actually mask the dynamic URLs with static ones.
So you will be replacing URLs that contain query strings with elements such as “?”, “+”, “&”, “$”, “=”, or “%” will contain the more search engine friendly “/” (slash) element and present themselves in a basic form.
There are some free online/open source tools available to aid in this endeavor.
Free online URL rewriting - https://smallseotools.com/url-rewriting-tool/
Open Source URL Rewriter for .NET / IIS / ASP.NET - https://www.ocpsoft.org/rewrite/
URL Examples:
Dynamic URL: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=3&view=basic (before rewriting)
Static URL: http://www.example.com/3/basic.html (after rewriting)
There are three major benefits of URLs:
A well-crafted URL gives a clear indication of what the destination page will be about.
Even if you hide the title, it will still be displayed in the breadcrumb.
This will help users to navigate to the right page. It will also help Google to crawl the page more easily.
As a result, it will rank the page more highly in search results.
URLs are important. They are a ranking factor. Keywords in the URL can also act as a ranking factor. There is more to a URL than just the keywords though.
When it comes to SEO, keywords are an important part of the equation.
While they are often used to direct users to a page, they do not have a significant impact on a page’s ability to rank.
URLs can be copied and pasted as links on forums, blogs, social media networks, or other online venues.
Best Practices For SEO