SEO is often an awfully detailed and nit-picky science. If you have an anal-retentive SEO specialist, hold onto him or her with all your might. Because just a few letters are sometimes the difference between ranking high up…or somewhere on the second page.

Your URLs follow a specific science. It’s not like you can do everything else wrong with respect to SEO, have a strong URL, and rank anyway. A URL appropriately structured for SEO is sometimes just the edge you need to move up a position or two—and snag a flood of traffic rather than just a drip.

With this in mind, make sure your URLs…

• Contain Your Keywords

You can’t argue this one at all. No, you don’t need to spam the c*ap out of 3-7 different keyword phrases. In fact, you shouldn’t do that.

The most important keywords for each page must appear somewhere in the URL. Besides sending a signal to Google, this also clues searchers in that your web page is in fact about the very topic they just googled. The URLs for each page show up just above the big blue title in search.

• Have a Logical Structure

Again, this one pleases both Google and your users. Say you run an e-commerce site with several product categories and thousands of products. Your structure should look something like: http://www.example.com/category/sub-category/product/.

Seems obvious, doesn’t it? What happens, however, is that this can become jumbled and out of order amidst multiple employees and several teams (and/or multiple SEO specialists who’ve worked on your website over the years).

• Are as Short as Possible

Shorter URLs are easier for Google and your users to understand. As such, leading blog URLs may look like: http://www.example.com/article-topic. Yep…just two words after the domain name.

You may or may not be able to do this for your site, but you should wherever possible. Don’t worry about grammar—your URL just has to be simple enough for your users to understand. Because if they can get it, so can Google.

• Aren’t Dynamically Generated

When was the last time you saw a URL like this?
http://www.example.com/products/?cid=7078ckuenkeulknn

Google has no problem evaluating this, but no user would ever search on that in Google. Instead, he or she may stumble upon this link through your site’s own internal search engine. So, you need to create clean and optimized URLs to ensure search can more easily recognize them and to keep your searchers happy. As one might imagine, this is often QUITE a project if your website has thousands of such pages. Thankfully, various tools exist to help you create sensible, optimized URLs.

Wrapping Up

So, that’s URL Structure 101. If you lack URLs like these, you’re missing out on a strong opportunity to rank higher in search, receive more organic traffic, and boost sales. Act accordingly.