SEO URLs?

[ShaneHolladay]

What are the best practices for generating SEO-friendly headlines?

• dashes between words?

• underscores between words?

etc.

Looking for a programatically generated solution that's using editor-written headlines to produce an SEO-friendly URL

Thanks.

[Reis_Inc.]

Hi Shane,

Use dashes, and make sure that the URLs are "hackable as well.  That is, they can easily be used to navigate to different sections of the site through modification.  For example:

You have a blog with two sections, news and movie reviews.  See two URL examples:

Good: http://www.myblog.com/movie-reviews/shane-reviews-ironman-3/

Wrong:  http://www.myblog.com/movie-reviews-shane-reviews-ironman-3/

If I am a user on your website, it would be a good experience for me to understand the structure of your site through the URL itself.  If I remove "shane-reviews-ironman-3/" from the URL, I should be taken to the movie reviews section of your blog.

Also, don't forget canonicalization.

Hope this helps!

Brice

[Backlinko]

When you say headlines, you mean URL?

Officially, dashes and underscores are treated the same.

I used to just make my URLs the same as my title (super-awesome-title-example.html).

But now I make them super-short (title-example.html) and to the point.