A site like https://serpbook.com helps you to identify some of the glaring SEO mistakes on your site so that you can dedicate resources to fixing them as early as possible. The importance of fixing such mistakes cannot be overemphasized. When you address such faults, you enhance the visibility of your site. But one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO is how your URL appears. It is necessary to pay a lot of attention to your URL because both viewers and search engines read them. Here are a few tips on how to optimize your URL structure.
1. Include a keyword in your URL
Keywords are the most important words and terms that are included in the content to help make pages visible online. When people are searching for content online, they usually use specific words. The words that people use form a familiar pattern that SEO practitioners seek to crack and take advantage of to enhance the visibility of sites. It is important for you to take advantage of the use of keywords and include some of them in your URL links. Including at least one major keyword in your link helps to make the link highly visible to Google and even to your readers.
2. Make your URL readable
Do not assume that no one reads your URL. In truth, all users take the time to read your link before they even read the content that is found on the rest of your page. Apart from humans, search engines also take a few seconds to read your URL. If you include the generic numbers that are usually created automatically when you are making a website, then you may not necessarily get punished by Google. However, many people tend to look down upon sites that only have generic URLs as opposed to those that contain readable statements. For example, if you are running a content writing site, then you may have to include simple phrases in your URL that are associated with the kind of work that you do for your clients.
3. Avoid including capital letters in your URLs
URLs are not supposed to be written in capital letters. Google and other leading search engines frown upon links that contain capital letters. Also, when people are visiting your site, and then they get URL addresses that are written in capital letters, then they may not like to spend a lot of time on your website. Thus, the need to use small case letters in your URL is more of an aesthetic than a functional one. Although no one will penalize you for using uppercase letters in your address, it is a good practice to avoid using them and stick to small letters to make your site friendly to users.
4. Do not stuff keywords in your addresses
As much as it is useful to include keywords in your URL, it is a very bad practice to stuff them in the address. Keyword stuffing is one of the bad SEO practices that Google and other search engines are always looking out to punish. If you stuff keywords, you confuse search engines into believing that your site has excellent content when the opposite is true. Keyword stuffing means that you fail to include essential things in your site and concentrate on tricking readers. For you to avoid getting penalized, prevent stuffing keywords in your URL link.
5. The shorter your URL, the better
Shorter URL is much better than longer ones. It is off-putting to see abnormally long URLs for sites when browsing the internet. In the spirit of ensuring that websites are very user-friendly, it is a good practice to provide that you use very short and accurate URLs. There are multiple tools that you can use to shorten your URLs and make them very friendly to your users. Thus, make the practice of shortening all your URLs to ensure that your visitors find it easy to use them and navigate your site. Moreover, using short URLs makes it easy for people to memorize them.
6. Use canonicalization
Canonicalization is a unique method that is used to avoid penalties for having duplicate content. At times, your web pages may get duplicated without your knowledge. When this happens, you end up losing a lot of rank points because major search engines penalize sites that carry duplicate content. But the saddest part of the story is that the duplication often occurs inadvertently. Therefore, you need to use this method to prevent the mistake from happening on your site.
In summary, these are some of the best and most useful tips that you can use to optimize your URLs. Optimizing your URLs helps to make your site friendly to users and perfect for search engine crawling. Google and other search engines tend to favor sites that contain short and keyword-driven URLs than those which have long and generic ones.
