{"id":1155,"date":"2020-06-15T18:04:03","date_gmt":"2020-06-15T18:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lvboard.infostore.in.ua\/?p=1155"},"modified":"2020-06-15T18:04:04","modified_gmt":"2020-06-15T18:04:04","slug":"how-to-create-seo-friendly-urls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lvboard.infostore.in.ua\/?p=1155","title":{"rendered":"How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\nGoogle talks about the importance of using simple, friendly URLs in their SEO starter guide<\/a>, but how do you do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s start with the good news: creating URLs for SEO isn\u2019t rocket science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you were to describe your page in a few words and replace the spaces with hyphens, that would usually be \u201cgood enough\u201d for SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you\u2019d probably prefer not to take a stab in the dark. So, below, we\u2019ll run through a simple process for creating optimized URL slugs and a few best practices for the rest of the URL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But first, let\u2019s make sure we understand how URLs are constructed.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The anatomy of a URL<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

URLs consist of many parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"the<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For SEO, the most important part is arguably the slug. You have to choose one of these every time you create a page or post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let\u2019s start there, and then we\u2019ll cover a few SEO best practices<\/a> for the rest of the URL.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to create an SEO-friendly URL slug<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s rarely much point changing existing URL slugs as it takes too much time. You\u2019re also likely to do more harm than good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let\u2019s focus on new posts and pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you did keyword research<\/a> and created content around that keyword, jump to step 6<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you created your page without doing keyword research (which is never a good idea if you want to rank), follow the steps in order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Start with your page title<\/a><\/li>
  2. Remove special characters<\/a><\/li>
  3. Remove numbers<\/a><\/li>
  4. Remove superfluous information<\/a><\/li>
  5. Boil it down to a keyword<\/a><\/li>
  6. Add keyword modifiers (optional)<\/a><\/li>
  7. Make it readable (optional)<\/a><\/li>
  8. Make it lowercase<\/a><\/li>
  9. Replace spaces with hyphens<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    1. Start with your page title<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Most page titles make perfectly optimized URLs with a bit of modification. So let\u2019s start here and run through a series of steps to get the best possible URL slug for SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For the purposes of this article, we\u2019ll use one of our own articles titled:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag (Our 4-Step Process)<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    2. Remove special characters<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Have you ever seen a URL with backslashes () or square brackets ([])?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Probably not, because these are unsafe characters<\/a> that don\u2019t belong in URLs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    You should remove these for obvious reasons, but it\u2019s also best practice to remove other special characters like commas, colons, semicolons, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Here\u2019s what Google\u2019s John Mueller says<\/a> about these:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I generally recommend avoiding special characters like commas, semicolons, colons, spaces, quotes etc. in URLs, to help keep things simple. URLs like that are often harder to automatically link (when someone posts in a forum or elsewhere), and hard for us to recognise correctly when we parse text content to try to find new URLs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    So let\u2019s remove all characters not in the alphabet\u2014although we\u2019ll keep the spaces in for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag Our 4 Step Process<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    3. Remove numbers<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    You\u2019ll notice that our post is a four-step process and that this number is in the title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    This is completely fine because a title is easily changed. If we update the post one day and add a fifth step, we can easily change the title of the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"title<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    It\u2019s a different ball game with URLs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    You\u2019ll have to redirect to a new URL whenever you change the number of items in the page or post to keep it current.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Redirecting a page or post usually isn\u2019t a huge deal. WordPress does it automatically when you change the slug. However, it\u2019s easy to forget to update the URL number when you update things, which leads to this kind of issue in the search results:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"2<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    A better solution is to negate numbers in the URL altogether. That way, you won\u2019t have to update the URL when you make minor changes to the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So let\u2019s remove the number from our potential URL:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag Our Process<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    4. Remove superfluous information<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Google says it\u2019s good practice to make URLs as simple as possible, and there are likely a couple of reasons for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    First, visitors may be intimidated by extremely long URLs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Second, long URLs often get truncated in the search results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"3<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    So let\u2019s remove anything we don\u2019t need from our potential URL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Note that you\u2019ll have to use common sense for this part. The aim isn\u2019t to make your URL so short that it no longer accurately describes its content. It\u2019s to remove unnecessary words and phrases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In our case, this is probably just everything that was in the brackets (\u201cour [4\u2011step] process\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    5. Boil it down to a keyword<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Most titles naturally contain keywords, so what you\u2019re probably left with at this stage is a simplified, keyword-rich version of your title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    While this might make perfect sense to use (and feel free to do so if that\u2019s the case), it often won\u2019t be very succinct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As we already discussed, this can lead to long URLs that get truncated in search results. The additional context can also be an issue should you ever want to update the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For example, we had a post with the slug \/basic-guide-anchor-text\/. When we updated this post, we added a lot of information. This made the guide not-so-basic, and we had to redirect it to a more appropriate slug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"4<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    So, the next step is to find the keyword that represents the most popular way people search for your page\u2019s topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    To do this, install and activate Ahrefs\u2019 SEO toolbar<\/a>, then Google your potential URL. Look for a similar page to yours in the results that also gets a decent amount of organic traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"5<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    IMPORTANT<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    If the pages in the search results aren\u2019t getting traffic, your page is likely about a topic with no search traffic potential. Because nobody is searching for what your page is about, it\u2019ll be hard to get organic traffic\u2014regardless of how well you optimize the URL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Avoid this mistake in the future by doing keyword research beforehand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Hit the \u201cKW\u201d link to see what keywords the page ranks for in Ahrefs\u2019 Site Explorer<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"6<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Look down the list for the most relevant keyword that matches your content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"7<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    If we were doing this for our post about title tags<\/a>, it would probably be:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    title tag<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    6. Add keyword modifiers (optional)<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Using an exact-match keyword for your URL slug often makes sense, but not always. Sometimes you\u2019ll find that it lacks descriptiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    A simple way to solve this is to add keyword modifiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Keyword modifiers are related words that add context to your URL. You can find them in the Organic Keywords <\/strong>report that we used in the previous step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For example, if we look at the report for our competing page about title tags, we see \u201cseo\u201d and \u201chtml\u201d pop up a few times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"8<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    It would make sense to include one or both of these in our URL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    There are no hard and fast rules to the way you do this. It\u2019s a case of using common sense. For example, any of these URLs would work for our post:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    SEO title tag<\/code>
    HTML title tag<\/code>
    title tag SEO<\/code>
    HTML title tag SEO<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Just don\u2019t stuff keywords like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    HTML meta title tag SEO<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Here\u2019s the one I chose for our post:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    title tag SEO<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    7. Make it readable (optional)<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Maybe it\u2019s just me, but some URLs just seem more digestible than others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Take the ideas above. I would argue that \/seo-title-tag\/ makes more sense than \/html-title-tag-seo\/. Why? I think it\u2019s because the former makes sense when used in a sentence, whereas the latter is just a random string of words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So, I often try to make URLs readable by adding conjunctions or pluralizing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For our post about title tags, I didn\u2019t do this because \u201ctitle tag seo\u201d seemed to read perfectly fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    However, for our post about the best WordPress plugins for SEO<\/a>, the most fitting keyword was \u201cbest seo plugin wordpress.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"9<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    That sounded odd, so I pluralized \u201cplugin\u201d and added the conjunction \u201cfor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"9<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    As you can see, the URL is still short and sweet but reads a lot more naturally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    8. Make it lowercase<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Most web servers treat lower and uppercase URLs the same, but this isn\u2019t always the case. Technically, everything after the hostname (domain) in a URL is case-sensitive, and some servers will treat them differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    To be on the safe side and to avoid potential duplicate content<\/a> issues, use lowercase URLs\u2014always.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    If you\u2019re using WordPress, you can skip this part because it happens automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"wordpress<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    If not, just to paste your title into convertcase.net<\/a> and choose lowercase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    title tag seo<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    9. Replace spaces with hyphens<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    URLs can\u2019t include spaces. Browsers rewrite them to \u201c%20\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Screen<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    So, the final step is to replace all of the spaces with hyphens (-).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Can you use underscores (_) instead? Google said in 2016 that they don\u2019t care if your URLs contain dashes or hyphens. That remains true from a ranking perspective, but as people are generally more familiar with hyphens, it makes sense to use them where possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It\u2019s also Google\u2019s official recommendation<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    Here\u2019s the final slug for our post about title tags:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    title-tag-seo<\/code><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Best practices for the rest of the URL<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Earlier in this guide, we talked about the anatomy of a URL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"the<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    The process above only tackles one part: the slug<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So here are some SEO best practices to keep in mind for the rest of the URL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n