10 day SEO Guide to Supercharge your Online Business - URL Optimization

Written on 2:59 AM by Mrudula

SEO is nothing but helping the search engines to do their job easily.Although search engines have worked hard to improve their ability to crawl and index dynamic sites, URL structure remains an obstacle for many website still today.

Here are few simple URL structure best practices your site can avoid or overcome many indexing issues.

Domain Names

* Limit length; technical limitations of 63 characters is far to long for an effective domain name
* Try to obtain a domain name that contains a key phrase relevant to your targeted ontent
* Avoid spammy URLs that have numerous hyphens (-) or misspellings
* Web 2.0 style names (IE Flickr) are all the rage (mostly because the real words are already taken
* Maximum character limit - 63 characters plus the TLD


Folder/File Names

* Separate words using - or _ so they can be read as separate words (IE avoid "hereismyseofolder")
* Limit overall length, compress directory structure into file naming convention to reduce directory levels


Overall URL Structure

* Limit the number of directory levels from the domain name to the file, avoid unnecessary folders
* Limit the overall length of the URL, avoid unnecessary words and characters
* Use keyphrases and real words - avoid shortened or meaningless words like /prod/ and /og/
* Avoid session IDs and other session based parameters in URLs
* Avoid having more than 2-3 name/value pairs in dynamic URL strings
* Rewrite dynamic URLs into 'clean' or static URLs wherever possible
* Maximum character limit - 2083 characters in IE, even longer for other browsers

Optimized file naming examples

Domain naming:

Bad: "eseeyohgyde.ws"

Better: "www.SaverSites.com"

Best: "www.SEOGuide.com"



Folder/Directory Naming:

Bad: "/na/do/"

Better: "/content/seo-guide/"

Best: "/seo/free-seo-guide/"



File Naming:

Bad: "prod.jsp?v=09&w=87&x=65&y=43&z=21"

Better: "pageID_0987654321.php"

Best: "free_seo_guide.php"



Overall URL Structure:

Bad: "https://Mispelt.ws/na/do/prod.jsp?v=09&w=87&x=65&y=43&z=21"

Better: "www.SaverSites.com/content/seo-guide/pageID_0987654321.php"

Best: "www.SaverSites.com/free_seo_guide.php

Canonical URL Optimization

GoogleBot treats xyz.com and www.xyz.com as two different web addresses, by which every page can be accessed as both www. and non-www. could get a split PR. Google also treats this as duplicate pages and punishes you for this. To resolve canonical issue problem, follow following steps :

1. Create a .htaccess file in the web root dir.
2. Copy and paste the following contents in it

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.sample\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sample.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.html$ http://www.sample.com/%1 [R=301,L]

3. Save the file and upload it to the root path of your web site.

And the other way is to use 301 (permanent) Redirection.

Redirect www.xyz.com to xyz.com or vise verse.

- Munnu

Posted in SEO |

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