{"id":290,"date":"2015-08-25T16:10:37","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T23:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.opte.website\/?p=290"},"modified":"2018-05-16T13:17:34","modified_gmt":"2018-05-16T13:17:34","slug":"designing-a-url-with-seo-in-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opte.io\/blog\/designing-a-url-with-seo-in-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing a URL with SEO in Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the past, people only cared about one thing, making a beautiful website that users would love. Fast-forward to the present and people need their websites to not only be beautiful but also to be found. There are over one billion websites in the world today and that makes finding an unknown company a challenge but there are things you can do as a designer or developer to give your work an advantage.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a developer, your main concerns might be site speed, crawlability along with other technical things. You might be thinking your work is hard enough without needing to learn about SEO, yet today\u2019s clients not only want you to have that knowledge, they need you to have that knowledge to remain competitive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Make a Search Engine Friendly URL<\/h2>\n

You\u2019re a human, I\u2019m a human, most people typing into a search engine are probably humans but search engines are spiders or crawlers or bots. While you can\u2019t think like a search engine, you can understand how search engines work. When you type a word, phrase or even a question into the search engine you are given a list of results.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"87<\/a>

87 millions different links! Who knew?!<\/p><\/div>\n

Those results come from spiders and bots that have indexed your website and have decided what your site is about based on many factors. Today we\u2019ll look at URLs in an SEO perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alesia Krush from Search Engine Journal<\/a> says, “from an SEO point of view, a site\u2019s URL structure should be:<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Straightforward<\/i><\/b>: URLs with duplicate content should have canonical URLs specified for them; there should be no confusing redirects on the site, etc.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Meaningful: <\/i><\/b>URL names should have keywords in them, not gibbering numbers and punctuation marks.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

With emphasis on the right URLs: <\/i><\/b>SEO-wise, not all URLs on a site are of equal importance as a rule. Some even should be concealed from the search engines. At the same time, it is important to check that the pages that ought to be accessible to the search engines are actually open for crawling and indexing.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

In doing these things you\u2019re helping search engines understand what your website is about, therefore, the spiders and bots can index your site easier and faster.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look a couple examples.<\/span><\/p>\n

Example URL 1: \u00a0https:\/\/robots.com\/products\/item23984<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

What do you think you will see? Firstly, you see the word robots but that only tells you one word, this site could be about anything. What is item23984? <\/span><\/p>\n

Example URL 2: https:\/\/robots.com\/reviews\/starships<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

What do you think you will see in this example? You see the words: robot, reviews, and starship. Chances are you expect to see a review of starships.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, which one do you think is easier for a search engine to understand? Going further here are few more tips to keep in mind when creating SEO friendly URLs:<\/span><\/p>\n