The Concept of SEO involves many Onpage and Offpage techniques that has to be followed for a site. Creating an SEO friendly URL structure is one of the basic Onpage SEO techniques that has to be followed to get your pages indexed so quickly. But unfortunately many webmasters fail to optimize their URLs for search engines so they obviously fail to get more results from search engines. In this article, let me explain you about some of the basic tips for creating a SEO friendly URL structure thereby helping you to get high results from search engines.
What an SEO friendly URL can do?
- An SEO friendly URL can describe your content well
- It helps to avoid duplicate content
- Helps in easy navigation
- Help in search engine ranking for your keywords
- Helps the user to remember your page
Top Tips for Creating a SEO friendly URL Structure:
1) WWW and Non WWW domain Versions:
Every domain has two major versions which is www and non www indexed in search engines. This should be consolidated in one way else search engine will see this as two different websites. The best solution for this would be you can use 301 redirect to point one version of the site to other .
On the other hand, You can submit both your versions in webmaster tools (i.e.,) you should submit your www and non www versions of your website in Google Webmaster Tools and set your preferred domain to one. There are even some drawbacks for this method of setting preferred domain in webmaster tools and it is listed below
- This particular method take care of Google search engine only
- This method is applicable only for root domains
But you should definitely take care of this issue very seriously because some of your backlinks will be pointing towards www version and some of your backlinks will be pointing towards non www versions so make sure that both the versions of your domain are consolidated. Always it is recommended to use 301 redirect to fix this issue.
2) XML Sitemap Creation
It is mandatory to create a XML sitemap so that the search engines can have a clear idea of your website. Actually XML sitemap simply refers to a list of your site’s pages . Also search engine uses the XML sitemap as the reference when identifying the Canonical URLs on your website.
3) Usage of robots.txt
You should also include robots.txt file for your website by blocking irrelevant webpage from being crawled by search engines. It includes your admin page, any page with sensitive information which you do not like to be crawled by search engines. Actually, robots file is nothing but the set of instructions to search engines of which to be crawled and which not to be crawled. Whenever a search engine visits your website it first looks for a robots file to see any instructions based on that your webpages will get crawled.
4) Canonical Tags
Suppose if your URL has duplicate content listed for two different URLs or a webpage then it should possess a canonical URL specified for them. Your URL should be free from confusing redirects
5) Special Characters
Your URL should not have any special characters or meaningless numbers. It’s a good practice to involve a keyword in your URLs.
Conclusion:
Hope now you got an idea on creating a SEO friendly URL structure. Just make sure to implement these tips and make your URLs more Search Engine friendly.