You spent countless man-hours trying to get your website up and running. So much brainstorming was put into the project that you are still dizzy. You have even moved on to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and have submitted your site to as many search engines as you could think of. You’re waiting for all the traffic to come rushing to your store and for the customers to be shoving one another to get their hands on your products or services.
But, so far – all you hear are crickets.
One of the most common mistake webmasters make when implementing an SEO campaign is not readily visible and can even be quite difficult to detect. While trying to tweak their SEO campaign, they focus on the content and keywords that are in plain sight and tend to ignore the one line that the whole site is represented by: the URL.
Most people tend to forget that a website’s URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is an integral part of any SEO campaign and contributes a lot towards a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) in more than one ways.
We will see how you, as a webmaster, can help your SEO campaign succeed by preventing disastrous SEO URLs.
1. Too Many or No Keywords At All: There is a balance that needs to be maintained when you use keywords in your URL. Search engines scan URLs for keywords that are relevant to the words that are being searched.
Obviously, if there are no keywords in it, you will lose out in the ranking game. For example, between sites that have equal SEO ranking, the one with the relevant keywords in its URL will always have higher priority.
On the other hand, add too many keywords, and Google will penalize you for keyword stuffing. We all know Google is vindictive – it will take a long time for your site to be forgiven.
2. Abbreviations: There is nothing wrong with using abbreviations in your URLs. In fact, using shorter names could save you a lot of time, especially if you have too many pages to work on. But, with every abbreviated word you are not only shortening your URLs, you are also losing out on the chance of including keywords for the search engines to rank you on.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. A good example could be “NASA”. Although almost everyone knows that the abbreviation stands for “National Aeronautics and Space Administration”, the chances that they will type the whole five words in their search engines – when researching the organization – is quite slim when compared to “NASA”.
Therefore, in this case, it would make more sense to use more of the abbreviation than the whole organization’s name. It pays to be famous.
3. Using Dynamic URLs: Webmasters who use applications to create their web pages should keep a close eye on the URL that the pages are assigned. The applications create URLs that include numbers and special characters, which search engines find hard to interpret even when keywords are included.
As a webmaster, you should search for dynamic URLs and replace them with search engine friendly ones. If you have too many pages and can’t do it manually, you can use software or scripts that are freely available on the internet, and have it done automatically. Even search engines don’t understand gibberish.
4. Not Using Separators: Search engines look for complete words when scanning URLs. If you want to make sure that your website ranks for specific keywords you should make it possible for search engines to know what the words are.
For example, if you were looking to rank for “computer repair” you would have pages on your website that looked something like “~computerrepairsoftware” and “~computerrepairhardware“.
When search engine robots crawl your site they pick up on “computerrepairsoftware” and “computerrepairhardware” as if they were one word. So, unless people entered the exact phrase, your site wouldn’t appear on SERPs for searches like “Computer Repair Software” or “Computer Repair Hardware”.
To do so, you could use a simple trick: insert a hyphen or an underscore as keyword separators: “~computer-repair-hardware” or “~computer_repair_software”.
Make sure you pause between words – even when you are writing them down.
Note: You should bear in mind that, although search engines do read and accept both the hyphen and the underscore as word separators, you would be well advised to use the hyphen as often as you can. There have been some issues with underscores in URLs.
5. Dead Links: Dead links are, like the name suggests, those that lead to nowhere. Apart from being annoying for visitors, who might decided then and there to never return to your site, because you keep leading them to a “404: Page Not Found” page, search engines too penalize you for one too many dead links.
The more you have of them, the more you will sink down the SERPs. Dead links will bury you!
6. Spelling Errors: This is probably the most common mistake webmasters make. A simple slip of the hand on your keyboard could drive your webpage way out of the scope, and reach, of your potential customers’ SERPs – they might never even see you.
If you sell “paint” and yet, you titled your pages “pint”, and then you had your URLs created using the second word, you’re going to have some angry drunks heading your way and not many of them will be painters.
7. Not too Deep, Not too Flat: Search engines make it a point to rank web pages by how deep in the hierarchy they are. The top page (usually the Home page) ranks the highest, and any page that is down the hierarchal tree (usually accessed by clicking on a link on the higher page) gets a lower ranking.
Therefore, if you have too deep a hierarchy, the pages that end up at the bottom will get the lowest ranking by search engines. That’s akin to never being seen in SEO terms.
On the other hand, if all your pages are on the same level and your structure appears to be too flat, it confuses the search engines. This is because the search engines won’t be able to tell which pages should be grouped together and what rank should be given to the pages that are higher up in the hierarchy.
The trick is to find a balance (isn’t it always?). Make sure all your pages are no more than 3-4 clicks away from anywhere in your hierarchy. If you can, make all the pages as close as possible to the home page.
Although these points will help in your having a site with very SEO-friendly URLs, you should always remember that SEO is a changing science and keep up-to-date on the topic. In the meantime, keep applying these steps whenever you create new pages.
