Here’s some advice that will hopefully set you on the path of greater search engine visibility and effectiveness. I want to address that very first piece of the website, the actual webpage name, or URL. This small key and component is something that deserves focus, because it can help or hinder your effectiveness and visibility of the webpage and website itself. So, what makes for effective URL’s?
-Explain your content
Descriptive URL’s like www.realestateagent.com/real-estate-los-angeles are way more effective at getting copy/pasted, shared, emailed, and recognized by the search engines than say, www.realestateagent.com/blah-blah-blah1234.
-Keep it brief
The shorter the URL, the better. It will be easier to copy /paste and remember, and will cut down on the effort the search engines will have to take to understand your content on the webpage.
-Static webpages are better than dynamic ones
A big trade-off in web design for small businesses is creating the great usability of PHP and the dynamic webpages it creates, and the less-changeable static HTML webpages that ultimately take more time and effort from your web designer, but are more visible to the engines. People and Google as well like clear description in the URL, and websites with ?&+=, etc are always going to be harder to index than real-estate-information.com.
- Hyphenate to separate
URLs with multiple keywords in the format of a phrase, should-be-separated-with-hyphens, as this is the best way to separate the terms.
-Use Keywords
Effective SEO means targeting competitive keyword phrases for search traffic, and placing keywords and keyword phases into the URL is a great place to drop another effective hint to visitors and search engines alike that this page is a great resource for that topic.
Hopefully this brief intro into proper URL naming will assist you in your current or next big website endeavor.
