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SEO tips to get you started

SEO tips to get you started - URLs

URLs are the specific addresses used to link to content. For example, the URL for this page is http://www.whitstabledesigns.co.uk/seo-tips-to-get-you-started-urls and can be seen in the address bar of your browser.

Search engines (Google, Bing and others) prefer URLs that are short, accurate and static. What does all of that mean? Let me show you...

Short URLs

Regardless of the way your web site has been built, whether it's a static site or it uses a content management system like Joomla or Wordpress, you should have some control over your site's URLs. Unfortunately if you have used a web site building tool like Wix, you will probably not be able to do much about your URLs. By the way, we have put together an article about why Wix and similar sites are not great for search engine optimisation over here.

Search engines will favour a URL that is shorter so find out how to manipulate your site's URLs and change things that look like this:

mywebsite.com/category/blog/posts/february/my-article-about-healthy-eating to mywebsite.com/healthy-eating

What we've done here is remove any information from the URL that is useless to search engine and to visitors of your site. If it's not needed, get rid of it.

Make it easier for your readers

Another consideration are the readers of your site. If you have a long URL that looks like this: mywebsite.com/232132/23121/123245532/article2.html - that is useless to your readers. Nobody can work out what that URL links to without actually visiting it.

Change it to something that people will be able to recognise. Put the article title in the URL, just as we did before (mywebsite.com/healthy-eating) so that if someone writes it down or saves it, they can easily identify what it is.

Use hyphens as separators

If you have pages on your site that have more than one word in the title you can use hyphens (-) in the page URLs to separate the words. For example, a URL like mywebsite.com/mygreatarticleabouthealthyeating should be changed to mywebsite.com/my-great-article-about-healthy-eating

Not only does this make the URL easier to understand for your readers but it also allows the search engines to easily identify the words in the URL.

 

As with most things that are SEO related, there is a link between what's best for the users of your site and what's best for the search engines. Making URLs easier to read (making them shorter, separating words with hyphens) also makes them better for search engines to understand what they are and to accurately index the content, making them more likely to rank higher in search engine results.

 

Confused? Need help? Please get in-touch and we would be happy to take a look at your web site and help move it up the Google rankings.