Use friendly URL'S

A technical strategy that is very effective and a must in 2019 is the usage of friendly URLs. To fully grasp how this SEO strategy works, it is important to understand what it is all about.

First off, URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, and is responsible for the specification of a website’s page. An example of a URL would be xyz.com/home/. URLs are unique, and no two pages on the internet have the same URL, and this is because a URL comprises two things – the domain name (xyz.com) and the path to a particular page on that website (/home/). As said earlier, no two pages, regardless if they are on the same site, can have the same URL.

A friendly URL then would be one that is easy for the users to read and understand. It is achieved by making use of easy to read keywords that accurately describe the page in question. An example of a friendly URL is xyz.com/home/ as anyone seeing it would know the page they ought to visit – home page. An example of a non-friendly URL would be xyz.com/gIhG489-=?/.

How to create a user friendly URL:

• Don't include spaces between letters. Replace spaces with dashes ( - )
• Don't use underscores in URL's: Google does not identify different words if underscores separate them.
• Don't use accents or Latin characters; they are not safe for using on URL's
• Include your main keywords in every URL of your site; they will give signals to Google on what's about your page.
• Try to keep your URL as shorter as possible.
• Use your keywords closer to the domain as possible. Example: https://www.seochecklist.app/seo-in-page, where the domain would be www.seochecklist.app and the main keyword in this example is "SEO In Page."

After creating the pages of your website, with good content and friendly URL's do not forget to create a Sitemap file and send it to Google.

Why Is It Important?

A friendly URL would, to a great deal, increase a user’s experience. This is because by merely seeing your URL, they can easily say what it is all about and that it contains the type of information they need.

As a user looking for information on napkins, what site would you most likely visit? Xyz.com/all-about-napkins/ or abc.com/ghtU98?-=/ ? The answer is obvious.

More importantly, a friendly URL would increase your website page’s chances of being recognized by search engines. This is because they know the content of your page (thanks to the descriptive keywords in the URL) and are sure their users can get the needed information on your site.

Top 4 SEO Tools for URL shortener

• Bitly (Free): even though Bitly can shorten URLs, this platform is also very powerful when it comes to analytics.
• TINYURL.COM (Free): TinyURL.com makes the list of top link shorteners. Now you can easily customize your link characters and keep them consistent for your brand
• REBRANDLY (Free): a top URL shortener for persons who wish to shorten links to post on their social media channels or other apps. With this tool, you can come up with customized short links and keep them consistent with your brand.
• SEO Ultimate (Paid+Free): SEO ultimate has a similarity with Yoast SEO. It is the ideal SEO package as it comes with additional features and extensions which include author highlighting, as well as, tools linking, 404-page tracker, etc.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to boost the links and URL's of your site

• Google XML Sitemaps (Free): Take your site's fortunes into your own hands with search engines by using Google XML sitemaps plugin which will auto-generate a sitemap for you to make indexing easier with search engines.
• Simple URLs (Paid): This system is used to entirely managed URLs and gives you the ability to create, managing, and tracking your sites outbound links.
• Redirection (Paid): this is a superb plug-in that lets you take the power of One URL and easily transfer it to another URL. The redirection plugin will help you to generate 301 redirect easily each time an article's URL is changed.
• WP Social SEO Booster – knowledge Graph Social Signals SEO (Paid): this plugin is built to get your site optimized for Facebook Open Graph as well as Twitter and Google tags.
• Google Analytics for WordPress (Free): Google has created the Google analytics tool to help you in website tracking on things like the number of sessions, page views for every session, bounce rate, as well as time spent on your website.

Did you know? According to Google, backlinks, content, and the general SEO performance of your web page is more effective if you have a friendly URL.

Expert’s suggestion: "My rule of thumb is to build a site for a user, not a spider” – Dave Naylor (www.Bronco.co.uk)