A URL called the Uniform Resource Locator is an address on the internet made up of a domain name, a path and a protocol. A URL structure is commonly known as a web address and specifies a resource’s location on the internet. A good URL Structure helps improve SEO by providing an excellent navigational experience.
Why is a URL structure important?
A URL structure is the organization of the content on your website. The URLs are the link between your website content and a target user. URL structure matters for the following reasons-
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User experience.
The most crucial factor in SEO is a great user experience. You should improve your user experience by using a logical URL structure. Organized content has the potential to make your website easier to navigate for the target audience. In addition to structuring the URLs with a logical organization, you should also use SEO-friendly URLs. It is essential to optimize URLs with relevant and descriptive keywords that provide a clear understanding of the page’s content.
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PageRank.
A URL structure is an attribute that tells the search engine what different website pages are about and how they relate to each other. Optimizing your URLs for people makes it easy for the search engine bots to crawl and index your website and provide relevant content to the searchers. Using PageRank, Google measures the value of a webpage and its relevance to search queries.
SEO-friendly URLs are the ones which increase the likelihood of a particular link being clicked on, and this also has the potential to increase your Pagerank.
The following are the best practices for URLs-
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Follow a magnificent URL structure.
Before building your website, you should figure out the URL hierarchy. A URL structure should be logical, simple and easy to remember. It is fairly simple to pick the right URL keywords for each webpage if your URL structure is in place.
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Use HTTPS protocol.
A secure version of HTTP protocol is HTTPS and it makes your site more credible.
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Keep the URLs short and simple.
It is the tendency of most URLs to automatically use the webpage or the post title as the default URL. You should try to keep the URL short and they are the ones which fetch a higher ranking.
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Make use of keywords which are meaningful.
It is important to make use of 1-2 keywords in your URL which are relevant and tell the search engine what the page should show up for in the results page. You should not indulge into keyword stuffing and it is not good for the rankings.
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Make use of hyphens to separate words.
URLs do not use hyphens and spaces to separate the words. However, you can make use of hyphens between words.
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Make use of lowercase letters.
URLs are case sensitive and you should make use of lowercase letters for your URLS. However, if you make use of the uppercase letters, you ought to update your links.