Though this doesn’t happen as often as it did 5 years ago, we still bring on clients to whom we suggest either re-writing the URLs to their site’s pages, or re-creating pages with search engine friendly URL structure and redirecting.

Please note that what we are talking about here is SEO friendly URLs (ways of writing your page URL structures to help with your overall SEO campaign) and not “search engine friendly URLs” (URLs that don’t contain too many query strings to as to cause problems with crawling/indexing). Though they often overlap, the search engines have gotten pretty savvy at crawling and indexing difficult to read URLs.

Instead, we are going to talk about a few pitfalls we see when people create their site’s structure and the manner in which the page URLs are created.

“Ugly” URLs

May as well talk about the URLs with query strings, etc. If you don’t know what that means, take a look at the following URL

http://seo-factor.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&category=M753n&style=gw3b

Usually you see stuff like this with eCommerce sites, but there are a lot of content-managed-systems (CMS) out there that produce ugly URLs like this for any of your pages. There was a time when this was a really big deal because search engines had a tough time crawling, categorizing and indexing pages like this, but that’s not often the case today. However, it’s still a hindrance to your SEO efforts, and can hold your site back from ranking for desired search terms.

Instead, using our fake “SEO Factor Shoe Store” as an example, we would want a URL a little closer to this:

http://seo-factor.com/mens-shoes/casual/black

The latter is much easier to read, and gives an indication to the content of the page before you even get to it (and that is what a search engine is looking at).

Underscores

We still see this type of URL structure quite a bit as well:

http://seo-factor.com/seo_friendly_urls.htm

This is obviously much easier to read, and will indeed give some sort of indication to the content of the page. But this can hinder your online marketing efforts in an indirect, but very real way.

You have to consider that underscores are not as common as dashes with regard to common grammatical knowledge, most online structures, etc. I know several people who aren’t completely sure how they would type an underscore if they had to.

If you were to share a page of your site verbally, or maybe via a notated-napkin, this may cause confusion when that person attempts to reach that page at a later date. If you’re thinking that this isn’t too big a deal, if that person were someone who may have otherwise linked to that page, you missed not only a visitor, but a ranking/traffic-boosting opportunity.

Besides that (which is genuinely more important) the last we heard Google still has issues considering the underscore a word separator. You can see a video on the topic by Matt Cutts. Please note that this video was published in February of 2009. That’s a long time ago in the world of the web. Either way, we simply don’t like here, and will fix them if we can.

[lightbox target=»http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k»]Matt Cutts – Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?[/lightbox]

Uppercase Letters

This is a bit of a tricky problem. Again with some content managed systems, URLs with uppercases are also a bad idea.

If I met you, and you asked for the location of my blog I would say to you:

It’s SEO dash Factor dot com forward slash blog.

And when you got home, you would type:

seo-factor.com/blog

But if the actual address was

seo-factor.com/Blog

Then you would be met with a 404 error. Ok, well not on this site (we took care of that specific one due to a problem during the site’s inception). And there are ways to handle this on the server side. But if you aren’t that savvy, and if you would rather spend your time more wisely, it’s probably best to stick with lower case letters for SEO friendly URLs.

Keyword-Stuffed URLs

Another problem we often see is the keyword-stuffed URLs. For this example, let’s use our fake SEO Factor Hotel. It’s in Jacksonville, FL. We are using a fake hotel for this example because you see this problem running rampant in the hotel SEO industry. I’m not too sure why, but it’s there. We will take a look at our “accommodations” page.

seo-factor-jacksonville-fl-hotel.com/jacksonville-hotel-accommodations.html

Seriously. Say that out loud. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Now try this on for size:

seo-factor.com/hotel-accommodations/

Much nicer, right?

The argument we usually get is that Google will (all other things being equal) give higher rankings to the site with keywords in their URL. This is true, but we have a few answers to that concern.

First, all other things are never equal. There are a large number of variables that go into ranking determination, and URLs with keywords isn’t nearly as important as other factors (and never worth the missed opportunity to brand yourself). We’ve been up against keyword-rich domains held by our clients’ competitors since the day we got into this crazy business, and we’ve always found ways to out rank them.

Second, Matt Cutts recently acknowledged the ranking trends for keyword-rich domains, and that they are giving a little attention to this issue.

You should check that video out, he goes into the subject with a bit of detail and insight.

Finally, it’s highly probable that Google knows exactly what it is you’re site is about by this time. If you’ve given any thought to SEO, (and sometimes if you haven’t) you’ve been sending signals to the search engines all along.

Consider our hotel again. There are going to be many sites that list our hotel with close proximity to the address or location information. The address is on our site, and we’ve created a Google Places page; again inserting the location address. Google knows where my fake hotel is, they don’t need me jamming my city and state down their pipes every chance I get. In fact, keyword stuffing may not always be a bannable offense, but it is an indicator as to the approach you are taking to promote your site. Do you really want that sort of attention on your site? I don’t.

File Extensions

We don’t hear this too often, but there is sometimes a question as to the most appropriate extension for file names. For example, should you use .html, .htm, .php, etc.? 99% of the time (and that’s leaving a single % margin just in case there’s some weird situation out there) it doesn’t matter. On this, just try to stay consistent so you don’t drive yourself crazy trying to remember what you were using for which page.

There is a thought that one is better for SEO than the others. This simply isn’t the case. In fact, if you use WordPress like we do, then you don’t get any extensions at all.

To Sum Up

To sum up the idea of SEO friendly URLs, consider the following:

Now that we’ve identified some common issues, and defined SEO friendly URLs, we will be following up this week with a post on solving some of these problems, and showing you how to determine the best plan of action. Here’s a hint, we are going to be playing with 301 redirects to pages with better structure and SEO value. Come on. Doesn’t that sound like a good time?

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