URL Structure for SEO
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In previous lessons, we have focused on how to write and structure individual posts to your blog, covering topics such as how to write an article, the importance of title tags as well as examining the benefits of cross linking and long tail keywords. Today, we are going to look more generally at how you should construct your URL Structure. This is both important for SEO and to help your users navigate through your content.
First and foremost, your content should be sensibly structured into appropriate sections. For example, if you look down the various categories on our website, you will notice that we have created categories such as “Blogging”, “Content Writing”, “Google” and “Wordpress”. The purpose of this is to assist users who are looking for information on a particular topic.
Therefore, if your agenda is to improve your content writing, you will find a selection of articles relevant to this topic under the content writing section. Organizing your content in this way helps users quickly locate what they are looking for, rather than having to sift through a number of irrelevant and unstructured articles to find articles which relate to what they want. If you don’t organize your content, your users will get bored and will soon leave your site and try and find it elsewhere.
URL Structure for SEO
As well as making your site user friendly, your URL structure can also have a positive impact for SEO. In a previous article, we looked at how selecting a keyword domain can bring significant SEO benefits.
The same can be said for longer URLs, by including your main keyphrases in the URL. First, let us look at an example of a bad URL structure.
There is nothing in the URL structure to tell the user or Google what the article is about. In contrast, lets look at how URL’s are structured on our own website.
http://www.howmakemoney.co.uk/seo/title-tags-page-title-tag/
As you can see, the URL structure we use is much more user friendly. As well as including the category (seo), we have included the page title of “Title Tags - Page Title Tag”. Not only does this tell the user what the webpage is about, but it also tells Google.
By including our keywords in the URL, it gives us a boost in our search engine rankings, assuming the keywords we use are relevant to the content of the article.
Having an optimal URL structure for your website straight from the beginning is very important, both because it will attract more readers and because it will be really difficult to change it afterwards.
Optimal URL structure for Wordpress
Wordpress users can set an optimal URL structure by going into the Control Panel, then Settings, then Permalinks. After you check the “Custom” structure and insert /%category%/%postname%/ as a custom structure. This will display the URL structure in the same format that we use.
