15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs

[HTMLBasicTutor]

A very good article from Rand Fishkin on the Moz blog about structuring urls:

...important caveat before we begin: the optimal structures and practices I'll be describing in the tips below are NOT absolutely critical on any/every page you create. This list should serve as an "it would be great if we could," not an "if we don't do things this way, the search engines will never rank us well." Google and Bing have come a long way and can handle a lot of technical challenges, but as always in SEO, the easier we make things for them (and for users), the better the results tend to be.

15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs

[progagan]

Thanks it is very infromational article but I always strugling with query Urls. Still I have not found any good solution for it. I am an marketing firm and I analyzed that some time it is not possible to replace or restructure the urls for clients specialy for ecommerce sites, then what we can do in perticular situatiation without restructuring the urls. And also tell me, how it harmful to our website ranking on serps.

[advent_geek]

yup i had read, 15 Golden Points for Structuring URL.

@HTMLBASICTUTOR Bro,

Canonical url :- can we include 2 urls on wordpress page using seo by yoast plugin

[david21]

again from moz, these Moz posts are always helpful. I use short url to share posts, so i want to know that is it good practice or not

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Canonical url - why don't you guys fix what ever you are using so Canonical urls are a non issue?

URL shorteners -
Do URL shorteners pass anchor text?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMkltd6dZzU

[kellyperry15]

Moz have tons of important articles and this one is one of the key factor. The url play major part in seo ranking factor. This will guide all seo experts to gain some useful knowledge and spl for the beginners who steped in the filed.

[erik_kyle_]

15 Seo best practice from Rand fishkin was amazing. I really go through with it.

I would really like these two points which help me a lot.

#11 Fewer folder is better.

#15 Keyword stuffing and repetition are pointless and make your site look spammy.

[etechspider]

Nice Article and Good Points were covered.
- I follow as short as possible url (cover main keyword in url)
- use of - to separate keuwprds in url
- taking care of canonical

These are must for me.

[EvaRays]

#2 point of that article is more important for any web-developer that URL is must readable by a human.
#3 need the keyword in held on the URL.
Otherwise nice article and gain more knowledge-based information from this article.

[yellowbrickroadrpts]

Hello. I do want to say thank you for the link to this article. I'm a relatively new web master, who followed the advice of one of those travel bloggers who said "you can have your own travel blog in 6 easy steps". Little did I know how very much was missing from those 6 easy steps, and how very much I was going to need to learn to keep my site safe, let alone grow it going forward.

So, as it relates to the article, after stumbling around some, I found the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which offers assessments of every post I make, and includes about 1/2 the items in that article. However a few were new to me, and now I find I need to do some more reading. Which is good. Knowledge is power...and optimized displays in search engines.

[Imran Asim]

Thanks for the article though but I have questions to ask, we have a client (a multinational soap brand) and they have around 20+ regional websites on their CCTLDs. They post somewhat same article on all the regional websites. Does google count them as duplicate content? for eg. abc.co.uk and abc.us (both are same brand, and posting same articles) would it affect my SEO?

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Originally Posted by Imran Asim

Thanks for the article though but I have questions to ask, we have a client (a multinational soap brand) and they have around 20+ regional websites on their CCTLDs. They post somewhat same article on all the regional websites. Does google count them as duplicate content? for eg. abc.co.uk and abc.us (both are same brand, and posting same articles) would it affect my SEO?

2 English sites might be considered duplicate content. Did you include the hreflang tag? Use hreflang for language and regional URLs That's assuming of course one used British English and the other uses American English.

[adithyamurali]

My 2 cents:

These are similar to what Brian Dean preaches:
1. Use your target mid tail keyword in your url
2. Publish as pages, and have very short urls (eg: backlinko.com/seo-campaign)

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Originally Posted by thirupareddy

i have a question about stop words in URL structure

it is any problem in url structure ?

Like for, in ... etc

If you had read the article before replying you would have seen this:

#8: Including stop words isn't necessary

If your title/headline includes stop words (and, or, but, of, the, a, etc.), it's not critical to put them in the URL. You don't have to leave them out, either, but it can sometimes help to make a URL shorter and more readable in some sharing contexts. Use your best judgement on whether to include or not based on the readability vs. length.

You can see in the URL of this particular post you're now reading, for example, that I've chosen to leave in "for" because I think it's easier to read with the stop word than without, and it doesn't extend the URL length too far.

[dinuanzz]

I still confused with Canonical url. Can you explain me or get some blog related to that

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Originally Posted by dinuanzz

I still confused with Canonical url. Can you explain me or get some blog related to that

Here you go, does this help:

A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page[1][2] as part of search engine optimization. It is described in RFC 6596, which went live in April 2012.

Continued: Canonical link element - Wikipedia

Here is another from Google Search Console Help:

This article describes how you can use canonical URLs to improve link and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures or via syndication.

In the world of content management and online shopping systems, it's common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs. With content syndication, it's also easy for content to be distributed to different URLs and domains entirely.

Use canonical URLs

[memodorial]

This one is partially related to URL structure too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlP5rBynK3E

URLs are the most important part.

[Nirmala]

Great post from Rand!

I follow most of the points that he has listed in this post to structure my post URLs.

I always avoid using the stop words in the URLs and make it shorter to play well in search engines.

Thanks for sharing the post.

[KevinJohnson1]

This is enlighten post for me as always, I am wondering about the points #3 and #6.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Originally Posted by KevinJohnson1

This is enlighten post for me as always, I am wondering about the points #3 and #6.

What are you wondering?