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.

Improving Your Site's Crawlability and Indexing

There are a few simple guidelines that you can follow to make your site more crawlable and more easily indexed by the search engines. In general, you need to focus on making your site as user-friendly as possible. Your second focus should be organization. Organizing your site so that it flows easily not only makes navigation easier to your visitors, but also makes more of your pages visible to the search engines.

Sitemaps can be an easy way to organize a site with a lot of pages. Your visitors can easily see where they are or need to go and search engines can tell which pages you intend to be most important. XML Sitemap pages are easily crawled by search engines and help the search engine to see all of the pages on your site.

Using links to help your visitors navigate the site is another good idea. Search engines have a hard time following image links like drop down menus. Text links are most easily followed. This is especially true if the text is short and to the point. You want it to be descriptive of the content on the page that you are linking to without being too lengthy. Links like "click here" are confusing to search engines, so stick to precise descriptive text for your internal links.

Work on your page titles and descriptions. Page titles should be descriptive of the actual information on that page. Each page should have a unique title. Avoid naming every page the title of your site. Also, avoid page titles like "Page 1", or lengthy titles that stuff in a lot of keywords. Be precise and to the point. Keep in mind that the page title will show up in search results when people are looking for your site. The goal of the page title is to inform the person looking if this is the exact page they are looking for or not.

The next thing that will show up in a search is the page description. This is the description meta tag under the header of your site. This should broaden the title of the page without repeating it. This is usually a couple of sentences. They can be a teaser to entice visitors to become curious about the page. Two or three sentences are plenty. Avoid using lists of keywords here. This is more a summary than a place to squeeze in keywords. Each page should have its own unique description.

These few tips can help you to make your site more user friendly and crawlable by the search engines. Indexing will be more efficient and search results will be more understandable and usable by visitors. A search engine marketing company will be able to go a lot more in depth with your optimization, but this is a starting point for you to start improving 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.