Optimize URLs of Your Blog/Website to Increase Visibility

As we have discussed yesterday, applying SEO blindly without caring about the rest of the visibility of the site can’t help your site reach more people as well as search engines.

If to talk about the things that play an important role in search engine indexing, URLs of the blog take one of the top positions in those vital list.

Many website owners, don’t actually think URLs also could play fair in SEO. If to demonstrate the issue with the well known phenomenon that you might have come across your webmaster journey is the 404 errors. Tell me now the answer for this question, Does your site yield good stats when you deleted some articles from your blog or website?

I think the question made you think about the URLs in SEO at least by now. We often face issues with URLs of our blog/website which we ignore because,

• We don’t know much about them
• We haven’t noticed them yet and the most drastically
• We consider that the search engines would take care of them

So the issues are normal and our non-reactiveness is not. We should react to the situation before it gets too worse causing search engines stomp your website down to hell.

Here are the simple and DIY URL optimizations you can do for your website in order not get labeled crap.

1. Keep URLs static

Static URLs are those which don’t change with the page load time, IP address or the user logged in.

Let’s say http://website.com/product.php is static and it has nothing to do with the date, day, IP address and user logged in. You see the same URL today and you can see the same URL later this season’s end.

Dynamic URLs are those which change according to the location, user logged in, time and date. For example, URLs like http://website.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 are dynamic. They don’t last long till the next sessions at least. They are made for providing security in fact.

Dynamic URLs are neither user nor search engine friendly. So it is better not to put them for indexing by search engines.

2. Fix too long URLs

Long-tail URLs are good for SEO but too long ones can’t make it. Do you remember the saying “too much of good is also bad”? It applies to long-tail URLs in case of SEO.

URLs with 4-6 words or up to 75 characters long is good. If your blog/website have too long tail URLs, optimize them to the limits.

Be careful while optimizing your URLs. Remember one single letter or character you change in your URL would make it go 404 error. Permanently redirecting the old URLs to new ones would help. For this, you should have the knowledge of error codes and what they actually mean.

3. Use Keywords in URLs

Instead of leaving URLs vaguely with some random first words of your page title may not look good in an SEO context. Though there would be no errors in its optimization means a +1 from normal in my opinion. Stuff the URL with the best performing keywords and see the change.

Remember not to include prepositions like ‘of’, ‘is’, ‘to’, ‘in’ and alike in the URLs as they could end up with too long tails or inappropriate keywords.

4. Create your own 404 page

As we talked about it earlier, in the beginning, 404 is not an alien to any webmaster. The ‘page not found’ error does considerable damage to the reputation of the website in search engine results. It is recommended to set a redirect of the deleted URLs to the homepage of the website or blog in most cases.

In case you don’t want a particular URL to be shown in the search results, it is recommended to demote the link using webmaster tools.

Regardless of any of the above case, you are recommended to show up your own customized 404 error page to your visitor so as to inform him about its removal or the new link.

Take a look at the examples of some creative 404 error pages that can be found on Google.

5. Fix broken links

Once you deleted an article in your blog or a page on your website, the URL of that particular page goes ‘page not found’ as we discussed earlier.

It is recommended to set 301 permanent redirects those broken links to new locations or homepage. The ‘not found’ visibility will cost you loss of positions on SERP. Permanent redirecting will help you at its best.

6. Upload Sitemap of your site

The sitemap is the raw version of your website with all the URLs of your pages and blog posts. Uploading a sitemap to your webmaster tools account will help search engines index the URLs of our website much easily and fastly.

Install this sitemap plugin if you are running your site on Wordpress and use this XML sitemap generator for blogger developed by Amit Agarwal of Labnol.org.

I hope these techniques will help you optimize the URL issues of your blog/website the most extent. If I miss any point or anything else to be added to the story, comment below.