SEO url best practices
-
We're revamping our site architecture and making several services pages that are accessible from one overarching service page. An example would be as follows:
Services
- Student Services
- Essay editing
- Essay revision
- Author Services
- Book editing
- Manuscript critique
We'll also be putting breadcrumbs throughout the site for easy navigation, however, is it imperative that we build the URLs that deep? For example, could we simply have www.site.com/essay-editing rather than www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing?
I prefer the simplicity of the former, but I feel the latter may be more "search robot friendly" and better for SEO.
Any advice on this is much appreciated.
-
Thanks donford, that's very helpful.
After thinking it over, I feel it's best to keep the urls as simple as possible and use something like /s/essay-editing for them (the 's' representing services).
Thanks!
-
Hi Kibin,
Based on your situation the 2 things of URL BEST PRACTICES at odds with each other are:
Length vs Content
I would say depending on the average overall depth you should be perfectly fine and likely see benefits from a strategy like "www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing" as this is only 3 layers deep. At some point however, there is no benefit other then folder organization to having long urls.
If you forsee your site getting over 5 levels of deepness you may want to consider a different structure. Long urls especially those containing URL parameters can cause crawl issues. There are 2 basic thoughts on urls; 1 can a user understand the url, and 2 will the crawlers be able to navigate the url and index it correctly? You want to design for the users first while keeping in mind the way Search Engines will view it.
Finally about the difference between
www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing
and
www.site.com/essay-editingWhat you miss out on the latter is long tail keyword opportunities ie..(student essay editing, student services essay editing). Those still can be incorporated into the content of the page and likely will with the breadcrumbs, but they will have a tad more power by having the keyword in the url.
Think of the user of the site first, then the search engines, then the backend administration.
As a user I like the short url but from an administration and SEO perspective I like the longer urls.
Hope that helps,
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best way to handle URLs of the to-be-translated pages on a multilingual site
Dear Moz community, I have a multilingual site and there are pages with content that is supposed to be translated but for now is English only. The structure of the site is such that different languages have their virtual subdirs: domain.com/en/page1.html for English, domain.com/fr/page1.html for French and so on. Obviously, if the page1.html is not translated, the URLs point to the same content and I get warnings about duplicate content. I see two ways to handle this situation: Break the naming scheme and link to original English pages, i.e. instead of domain.com/fr/index.html linking to domain.com/fr/page1.html link to domain.com/en/page.html Leave the naming scheme intact and set up a 301 redirect so that /fr/page1.html redirects to /en/page1.html Is there any difference for the two methods from the SEO standpoint? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Lomar0 -
Best Practices for adding Dynamic URL's to XML Sitemap
Hi Guys, I'm working on an ecommerce website with all the product pages using dynamic URL's (we also have a few static pages but there is no issue with them). The products are updated on the site every couple of hours (because we sell out or the special offer expires) and as a result I keep seeing heaps of 404 errors in Google Webmaster tools and am trying to avoid this (if possible). I have already created an XML sitemap for the static pages and am now looking at incorporating the dynamic product pages but am not sure what is the best approach. The URL structure for the products are as follows: http://www.xyz.com/products/product1-is-really-cool
Technical SEO | | seekjobs
http://www.xyz.com/products/product2-is-even-cooler
http://www.xyz.com/products/product3-is-the-coolest Here are 2 approaches I was considering: 1. To just include the dynamic product URLS within the same sitemap as the static URLs using just the following http://www.xyz.com/products/ - This is so spiders have access to the folder the products are in and I don't have to create an automated sitemap for all product OR 2. Create a separate automated sitemap that updates when ever a product is updated and include the change frequency to be hourly - This is so spiders always have as close to be up to date sitemap when they crawl the sitemap I look forward to hearing your thoughts, opinions, suggestions and/or previous experiences with this. Thanks heaps, LW0 -
Mobile SEO Tips and Best Practices
Hi, Any advice on approaches for mobile SEO much appreciated. For example, what things do I need to do to optimise a mobile version of a desktop site? E.g. optimise titles, meta description, headings and copy, do I need to submit a mobile sitemap to Google? Do I need to link from the mobile page to the corresponding page on the desktop site and vice versa? Will Googlebot Mobile naturally find the site from the desktop link? What about link building for mobile sites, any thoughts on this, are there specific mobile sites that will link such as directories for a start? Any other tips or resources? Any SEOMoz resources on this? What about the same domain versus the subdomain debate about hosting the mobile site? Any thoughts? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | MarkChambers0 -
Can I redirect a URL that has a # in it? How?
Hi there - My web developer is saying that I can't do a URL redirect with a "#" in it. Currently, the URL is actually an anchored link within a page (which the URL indicates with a #). I want to change the content to a new URL, but our website links internally to the old URL, so we would need to do a URL redirect (assume 301). Can you tell me if this is possible and how? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | sfecommerce0 -
Double byte characters in the URL - best avoided?
We are doing some optimisation on sites in the APAC region, namely China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. We have set the url generator to automatically use the heading of the page in the URL which works fine for countries using Latin characters, but is causing problems, particularly in IE, when it comes to the double byte countries. For some reason, IE struggles with double byte and displays URLs in their rather ugly, coded form. Anybody got any suggestions on whether we should persist with the keyword URLs or revert to the non-descriptive URLs for the double byte countries? The reason I ask is it's a balance of SEO benefit vs not scaring IE users off with ugly URLs that look dreadful and spammy.
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0 -
SEO LINKS
New to S.E.O. so excuse my naivety. I have made lots of new links some of them paid for e.g. Best of the Web but I don’t see any change in the latest competitive link analysis. Some of the links we have been accepted for just do not show. Also the keywords we are trying to promote the most have disappeared off the radar for over 2 weeks now. I think we have followed the optimization suggestions correctly. Please could you enlighten me. Regards Paul www.curtainpolesemporium.co.uk
Technical SEO | | CPE0 -
What is the best top menu linking structure (for SEO) for my site: A or B?
I don't know if these two scenarios are any different as far as SEO is concerned, but I wanted to ask to get an opinion. On my website: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com you can see there is a top menu with "About" "Info" "Questions" etc. Some of these links lead to further pages that are essentially a indeces for multiple further links. My question is: in terms of SEO, is it better to A) have all links (that are now on the pages that the menu links lead to) displayed in a drop down menu directly from the top menu (and bypassing an intermediate page) or B) to have it as it is now where you have to click to an intermediate page (like "rain chain info") to get access to the links (and not have such a large drop down menu) Is there a difference in terms of SEO? In terms of useability it almost seems like a toss up between the two, so if there were better SEO value to one of the other, then I would choose that one. By the way, I know that the way it is structured now is strange, where there is only one drop down that leads to the same page as the top menu item, but that will be fixed, fyi. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
When URL rewrite can lead to un pretty URLs
Hi Mozzers. I've a client that has done a little bit of mess rewriting the URLs of its site. In fact, also the data base driven URLs are rewritten, but the dev forgot to change the space with "-", so that now the 95% of the URLs are like this one: http://www.portalesardegna.com/search/Appartamenti e Residence/ Obviously not really a pretty URL. I am not so sure if this issue has an SEO consecuences (in fact, the site ranks pretty well also with those kind of url), but I am thinking more on usability issue. Could you suggest me any easy fix to this rewrite problem?
Technical SEO | | gfiorelli12