What does a friendly URL mean?

 

URLs play an important role in the experience that your site offers to its users, but also in your SEO strategy. Despite this, it is an aspect that many tend to overlook. It's surprising how many websites still have URLs that are just an inconsiderate succession of numbers, letters, and symbols. answerhop

Take the example of a site called www.mauvaisexempledurl.com. It would undoubtedly have a subpage whose URL would be http://www.mauvaisexempledurl.com/categorypage.asp?prodld=1234567. This type of URL is often generated automatically, without taking into account its impact on the website's digital marketing strategy. It's a URL that isn't SEO-friendly at all and there is a lot that could be done to improve it and maximize its SEO potential. 

Search engine crawlers use URLs to find, access, and sort website content so that they know which pages to show in search results. They also have an influence on the click-through rate and the ease with which Internet users navigate on your site. All these elements are ranking factors, so there is no question of making a mistake. In this article, find out everything you need to know to create the best possible URLs and avoid the most common mistakes.  nanobiztech

What is a search engine friendly URL? 

This is a URL that meets the three conditions below: 

• A URL in which the keywords are well used and allow to boost SEO and avoid penalties
• A URL that search engine crawlers can easily find and index  
• A URL whose structure allows robots to easily understand what the page is about and how it fits into the rest of the website 

Let's take a look at how to get your URLs to follow all of these recommendations. globalmarketingbusiness

Do not include a date in your URLs 

This is a common mistake bloggers make. They automatically generate their URLs to include the day, month and year of publication of their article. This approach should be avoided for two reasons. First of all, dates take up unnecessary space, and you could use that space to embed more specific long-tail keywords in your URL. URLs that are built around keywords and have a logical structure increase the likelihood that all pages on a site will be properly crawled and indexed. 

Then, and perhaps more importantly, even though a specific year may be important for a particular event, such as the 2020 Oscars for example, mentioning the year in question in the URL of a page makes this page unusable for subsequent years. You should know that the dates indicated on the pages are taken into account by the search engines when they establish their rankings. This means that a page with a URL and content referring to a past event will often be deemed outdated and irrelevant to general search, which does not specifically mention that year. So you need to update the dates in your page content if you want a chance to rank, but. allinonetechs

Never change the URLs of your pages that are ranked

Modifier l'URL d'une page sans mettre en place une redirection 301 digne de ce nom vous fera purement et simplement perdre le classement que vous aviez obtenu pour cette page. Lorsque vous changez le nom d'une vieille page, c'est comme si vous supprimiez l'ancienne page pour la remplacer par une nouvelle et que vous jetiez aux ordures son ancien classement. Par ailleurs, les pages que vous supprimez sur votre site ne sont pas immédiatement supprimées de l'index des moteurs de recherche. Elles peuvent donc continuer à être proposées aux internautes pendant un certain temps si vous ne les redirigez pas correctement et les personnes qui cliqueront dessus se retrouveront sur une page d'erreur 404. Cela risque de ne pas faire bonne impression auprès de nouveaux clients potentiels et c'est très mauvais pour vos classements.  leadmarketingbusiness

Instead of wasting your time and energy redirecting your old URLs or creating new pages every year, simply avoid adding dates to your URLs. This is what most major music festivals like Glastonbury or Coachella do, for example .     

Thanks to this technique, it is not necessary to create a new page every year, it is enough to update the dates, the line up and the details of the new edition on a page with a general URL that they reuse every year.  

Find the right structure 

You don't just have to pay attention to each URL individually. You should also consider how the names of your URLs are structured and refer to each other. If you don't have a site yet and are about to create one, consider including a keyword in your domain name. 

For example, you could imagine that you choose the domain name "www.tshirtsdesbeatles.com" because you want to optimize your site for the keyword "beatles t-shirts". 

However, you may not be able to afford to purchase this URL or it may be too specific. In this case, you might consider adopting another structure and adding your keyword to the end of the URL of a subpage of your site, for example "www.rocktshirts.com/tshirtsdesbeatles"

This technique is still a good way to optimize your URL for this term, even if the first example was more optimal.

No matter where you decide to embed your keywords in your URLs, pay attention to each URL on each subpage and always favor keywords over sets of random letters and numbers. A site with a URL structure designed for SEO will rank much better than a site without and will also attract more clicks from Internet users. 

Use the right characters 

The worst URLs for SEO are the ones that search engines simply can't find because they have characters that their crawlers can't read. This is why it is essential to only use characters accepted by search engines in order to avoid creating invalid URLs. technologycompanians

Here is the basic list of characters you can use:  

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

0123456789

-._ ~: /? # [] @! $ & '() * +,; =

Any character not on this list risks creating an invalid URL if not matched correctly with the correct percent-encoding, but we'll get to that later. Among the characters most often misused are the English quotes "", be careful not to use them in your URLs.

By the way, you should know that some of the characters in the above list are so called reserved characters. These include the following characters: 

: / #? & @% + ~

These are characters that perform a specific function in URLs. For example, the "/" sign is used to separate the different sub-sections of a website and the "#" sign is used to create URLs that directly redirect the Internet user to a specific part of the page. Unless you know exactly what these characters mean and how they work, I advise you not to use them in your URLs.