SEO url best practices

[Kibin]

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.

[Kibin]

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!

[donford]

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-editing

What 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,