Influencing SEO with URL
Influencing SEO with URL can sound like a stretch, but they impact each other greatly!
Having a poor URL structure can greatly impact your SEO. It can ruin rankings, keep your pages or website out of the indexes of search engines, and take away ranking authority from some pages or even the whole website.
There are 3 main benefits for improving your URL that influence the SEO.
- Improved User Experience- Humans and search engines both benefit by being able to understand what the website is about by just looking at the URL. You shouldn’t have to look at the title tag in search engine indexes to know where the URL links you to.
- Rankings-While URLs are a minor factor in rankings, they do influence the authority of the overall domain itself. Also, inserting a focus keyword in the URL can act as a ranking factor.
- Links-The prime URL is one that is written so well that it can be used as its own anchor text. The benefit of this is that it is readable to both human and search engine eyes.
This cheat sheet gives an overview of what makes a good URL. Briefly, a good URL should be clear and easy to understand. It should be sprinkled with focus keywords that your website is about, and could be used as its own anchor text. An Old Dynamic URL tend to be long and hard to read due to unsafe characters. There are also extra words in an Old Dynamic URL that will dilute the SEO value, and sometimes create other problems such as security issues and duplicate content issues. Different characters that cause problems are the Pound Symbol #, Underscores _ , and Uppercase Letters.
For auctions, each item will have its own customized permalink. This can be confusing at times, but if you provide the right content, search engines will have no problem with perceiving it. Auctions at times do also have longer URLs than most. The important factor would be to make sure these long URLs are readable and understandable. Having unsafe characters will make the SEO plummet, so making sure the URL is clean will be a huge help.
Want to get started with SEO or any of our other marketing services?