Creating User-Friendly URL’s for Your Site

Improving the URL's of your site may be a daunting task, but the payoff could be great. Hard-to-remember or reproduce URL's are a big reason that a lot of visitors never make it to a lot of sites. They make navigation difficult for users and in turn, can affect your search engine positioning.

Long, complicated URL's can be very annoying to users. Long streams of numbers, punctuation and odd characters are virtually useless to most people. The potential for error in reproducing them is great and can result in a lot less traffic to your site. Partial URL copying is just about guaranteed for URL's that are too long. Bookmarking and linking to your site will be greatly reduced if your URL's don't make sense or are simply too long.

A simple way to structure your URL's is to make it obvious which page you are going to when you look at the URL. It should also make it obvious how important the page is and where it is located on your site. For example, "examplesite.com/home/furniture/kitchen/chairs/" tells you that you are in the kitchen area of furniture, looking at chairs. This can help to improve navigation for your users and simultaneously improve crawlability by search engines.

Make sure that anticipated links also work. If someone sees the above link and wants to go to the furniture section, can they simply leave out the "/kitchen/chairs/" portion of the URL and be directed to the furniture page?

Browsers like Google Chrome have made it a lot easier to type in URL's by hand, but not everyone uses browsers with URL self-correct. Work on making your URL's self-correcting. Consider common mistakes that people make when typing in your URL's. Capitalization, punctuation, synonyms, misspellings, partial URL’s and old URL's should automatically redirect users to the page that they intended to visit.

Breadcrumb links also improve navigation and cut down on people guessing what the URL's of certain pages are. For example, each page should have a breadcrumb navigation trail of links like this example:

Home < Furniture < Kitchen < Chairs

This makes it really easy for people to link to other pages in your site. You can also avoid drop down menus and images that aren’t easily followed by search engines. Two birds with one stone.

Improving your URL’s keeps your site really organized and user friendly. It should help increase the amount of bookmarking and sharing of your information as well. Easy to read and understand URL's make it obvious to search engines how important each page is and where it lies in your site. Improving your URL's is one of the things that your search engine marketing company will look at when optimizing your site.

About the Author: Stacy Pessoney is a Project Manager for ArteWorks SEO, one of the top search engine marketing companies in the world. A graduate of the University of Alabama, she implements and manages comprehensive SEO strategies and serve as an organizational liaison among company executives, clients and colleagues.