Google emphasizes on the importance of URL. Seo friendly URLs are URLs that are optimized for the users and search engines both. Well optimized URLs are crucial for good SEO performance. They can be created by following practices:
- URLS should be readable
- URLS should be short but definitive
- URLS should have proper structure
What is a URL?
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Basically, URLs tells the location of pages to the users and search engines. URL consists of following things:
- Protocol
- Subdomain (if any)
- Domain
- Top-Level Domain
- Subfolder
- Slug
Types Of URLs
There are two types of URLs
- Absolute URLs
- Relative URLs
Difference Between Absolute URLs & Relative URLs
- Absolute URLs: Absolute URLs contain the entire address from the protocol to the domain name and includes the location.
- Relative URLs: Relative URLs does not use the entire address; it only contains the location following the domain. The relative URL path starts with a forward slash which leads the browser to stay within the current site.
How To Create an SEO-Friendly URL
Creating a Seo friendly URL is not very hard. So, let’s focus on the following points that would help you in creating a friendly URL.
- Remove Special Characters {(), @, {}, etc}
Have you ever seen special characters in URLs? Maybe not. That’s because the URLs should be special characters free. If you have special characters in your URL while creating a new page you should create a URL having no special characters in it.
For Example:
URL having special characters: https://www.abc.com/@Seo$FriendlyURLs & URL having no special character: https://www.abc.com/seofriendlyurls - Remove redundant Information
Google says it’s a good practice if the URLs are simple and concise. So, it’s a good practice if you remove the redundant information from the URL because when it appears on the Search Engine the URL is lengthy which often gets truncated.
For Example:
https://www.abc.com/the-best-seo-friendly-urls-tips-in-2024 & https://www.abc.com/best-seo-friendly-urls - Does Not Have Upper-Case Letter
Your URL must not have any upper-case letter because the URLs are case sensitive.
For Example:
https://www.abc.com/Seo-Friendly-URLs &https://www.abc.com/seo-friendly-urls We can see these URLs as different URLs. Use the URL that has lowercase characters in it. - Use Hyphens Instead of Spacing
Separation of the words in the URLs should be done by using hyphens. Underscores are also supported by the search engines but hyphens are preferred by the user eyes.
For Example:
https://www.abc.com/seo-friendly-urls & https://www.abc.com/seo friendly urls
Additional tips:
- Using Post Title: using post title in the URL’s slug is a good practice to optimize the
- Edit Permalinks: edit permalinks manually to optimize the URL
Why SEO-Friendly URLs Matter
SEO friendly URLs are not only the ranking factor, they have many other benefits:
- Search Engine Understanding: Simple and Clear URLs help search engines to understand better about the website content. It may have good impact in ranking your website.
- Better User Experience: URLs which are easy to understand probably result in better engagement.
- Better Click-Through Rates: Clear URLs are more likely to attract users who are looking for specific information. It can result in increased organic traffic.
- Crawlability: SEO friendly URLs are easier to discover by the crawler, that helps in indexing and leading to better search engine visibility.
Are Shorter URLs better for SEO
Short URLs not only helps in getting better ranking on search results, they are also easily understood by the users.
Which module creates search engine friendly URLs automatically
Pretty URL Module makes SEO Friendly URLs of the pages by automatically removing the IDs & numbers from the URL. It also adds meta tags, generates sitemaps and robot.txt.
Conclusion
URLs play an important role in SEO, make sure that the URLs are readable, short and descriptive. It is a simple yet an effective method to improve your search engine visibility and user experience.