Why SEO Friendly URLs Are Important
Why Should You Make Your URLs SEO Friendly?
A lot of people think that having keywords in your URLs helps with search engine rankings. I would say this true for your domain name. But for any part of your URLs after the domain name, the keywords don’t carry much weight (meaning if the search engines were only to rank your site by your URLs alone, keywords after the domain name wouldn’t count for much). However, there are few reasons why you want to keep your URLs “SEO Friendly”…
First off, what are SEO friendly URLs? Well here is a simple example:
http://www.yourdomain/seo-friendly-urls
The idea is that your URLs don’t have all sorts of weird characters, number and long strings of meaningless junk in them.
Here is an example of an unfriendly URL:
http://www.yourdomain/?&q345adfasdf-asdf–asdfa234432asdkf
Here are 3 reasons I can think of as to why you want SEO friendly URLs:
1. If People Decide To Link To A Certain Page On Your Site
Sometimes when people link to you, they will use the URL as the anchor text in the link. And for that reason alone, one should institute SEO friendly URLs. Chances are if you place keywords in your SEO friendly URL:
http://www.yourdomain.com/here-are-my-keywords
Then at least your keywords will get picked up in the anchor text. And having keywords in the anchor text of links is one of the biggest drivers in SEO.
2. Aesthetics
I think there is certain trust issue with long, ugly looking URLs. I personally get a weird, warning (like I’m about to get a virus feeling) when I see URLs that look like http://www.yourdomain.com?&dasfasdjk9o8u34oI*Uojoasdfasdfalskdhfulaishdfkla. I think that can be safely assumed for a certain percentage of internet users as well. So why scare them off? Focus on nicely trimmed, easy to read URLs.
3. Copy And Pasting
Finally, we have all seen what happens to URLs that are too long. Someone copy and pastes the URL and tries to send it to you in an email. And for whatever reason, the URL gets broken apart during the transmission or formatting process, and it’s basically a dead link. Why limit your exposure with URLs that can “break down” and are hard to virally spread?
So that’s all I got for SEO friendly URLs. Anyone else having anything to add to this?
I love clean URLs.
Having short ones is important too. When pasting a URL into Twitter, for example, if the URL is too long, Twitter will auto-condense it to a tinyurl or bit.ly – followers are much more likely to click on something that can actually read the URL of versus something that looks like this: http://bit.ly/29rFES
Sean, do you know at what character length Twitter automatically shortens URLs?. I notice sometimes that it won’t shorten my URLs and I’ll have to go to bit.ly to shorten it myself..