Today were going to talk about something that you may or may not have any control over.  The URL structure of your website.  I am going to make the assumption that you are using one of the more popular content management systems and give some simple tips for each.  If you’re not then I would highly recommend looking at one of them.

We use Wordpress for almost every website that we create and have also used Drupal and Joomla.  All three of these are free, open source, have huge support systems, and thousands of free themes.  Using a CMS like Wordpress cuts down on our development time by at least half and saves our clients thousands of dollars.

General Tips

Human Readable URL’s

Human Readable: www.site.com/category-name/page-name
Not Human Readable: www.site.com/index.php?cat=1&page=356

Making your URL’s human readable has a couple of huge benefits.  First, it allows your customers to understand your site structure by looking at where they are. Secondly the URL will naturally contain keywords that search engines can read and use to rank your page.

Use Hyphens instead of Underscores

If possible use hyphens for spaces instead of underscores.  Not only are hyphens easier for your surfers to read but search engines generally understand that a hyphen breaks up two separate words.

Short and Sweet

The limit on URL length seems to be around 2,000 characters before browsers won’t display them.  For practical purposes though the shorter the better.  A good rule of thumb is to remove all non-essential words from the url that you can.  Common stop words like a, and, the, or, of and so forth can all be removed.  Creating a short and keyword rich URL is a major foundation in on page SEO.

Wordpress Tips

Wordpress comes standard with the ability to specifiy your url structure which Wordpress calls Permalinks.  This page on the Wordpress codex explains the basics.  The permalinks that I tend to use most are

/%category%/%postname%

I have found that this permalink code gives me nice clean URL’s.  I then edit the post slug when writing to eleminate extra words which allows me full control over my URL.

Drupal Tips

Drupal also comes standard with the ability to construct what they call Friendly URL’s.  There is also a popular module Pathauto that will handle this automatically and I highly recommend it.  The Pathauto module uses patterns much like Wordpress to build the URL structure.  These patterns are detailed on this page in the Drupal documentation.

Other CMS’s, Shopping Carts, Forums, etc

Most other Content Management Systems have the ability to edit the URL structure or have add ons that do.  It is very important to good SEO to have a consistant and keyword rich URL so I highly recommend looking into the options you have on your CMS.