URLs are the foundation of websites. They play a significant role in both search engine optimisation (SEO) and user experience.
URLs form the information architecture of your website. They help users navigate, and they help Google crawl. They need to be clear, descriptive, and well-structured, allowing users and search engines to understand the content of the page just by glancing at the URL.
But there’s a bit more to it that that. Here are some key URL best practices to know.
Key Takeaways
- Keep your URLs stripped to essentials. Remove filler words and stay focused on the core subject.
- Instead of shoving numerous keywords into the slug, pick a single keyword for the URL and let the page content direct the rest of the conversation.
- When creating multi-word URLs, use hyphens to separate words, as Google recommends them to help users and search engines identify the words.
- Use lowercase letters when creating new URLs. Check that the lowercase destination works before applying the redirect.
- When you have grouped URLs, you can quickly crawl and audit entire site sections.
Table of Contents
The Importance of URL Best Practice
Getting your website URL structure right can greatly improve SEO visibility and user experience. Great URLs are a blend of technical know-how and creative keyword targets.
URLs Enhance SEO and User Experience
URL structuring can have a significant impact on SEO. A tidy, well-structured URL, utilising the right keywords, makes it easier for search engines to crawl, understand and index your pages.
Structuring does a lot for relationship creation between pages. A logical hierarchy will immediately assign an up flow and down flow of relevancy between URLs. As an example:
yoursite.com/haircare
yoursite.com/haircare/shampoo/
yoursite.com/haircare/shampoo/dry-shampoo
This is a basic hierarchy that follows a logical sequence.
You can’t have dry shampoo without shampoo, and you can’t have shampoo without haircare. This is known as a silo structure. It’s a process to basically tell Google: “Hey, these pages are part of the same category/topic”
This structure also helps users better understand where they are on the website, and navigate around.
Simplicity and clarity are king when it comes to user experience. A clear and descriptive URL gives users a hint about the content they can expect on your page, which aligns directly with their search queries. The other great bit is with breadcrumb navigation, you can further enhance the relationship between pages, and also give users a logical sequence of URLs to click on as they navigate.
Good URL Structures Facilitate Website Maintenance
Many in SEO would have come across client sites with a flat URL structure. These are typically service pages and category pages that standalone, outside of any logical hierarchy. To make it worse, they often become orphaned URLs due to poor internal linking. An example of a flat URL structure is:
yoursite.com/haircare
yoursite.com/shampoo
yoursite.com/dry-shampoo
As you can see, it’s quite different from the hierarchical structure. Now imagine this 1000+ times. It creates a mess of a website.
Outside of the SEO upside that comes with URLs grouped together in folder paths, one often overlooked aspect of URL structuring best practice is technical auditing and maintenance.
When you have grouped URLs, you can quickly crawl and audit entire site sections. In any popular crawling tool, and GSC, you can filter URLs by folder path. This is a great way to segment technical audits and also keep tabs on performance of those pages.
When it comes to reporting, hierarchical URLs are much easier to analsyse as a group. You can quickly say: “The /haircare/ site section grew by 5% in sessions MoM”.
URL Structure Best Practices
Lets look at the practical side of URL structure optimisation. Here’s my take on the top five must-follow best practices for URL structuring.
Keep it Concise and Descriptive
It’s a golden rule of thumb, both for the sake of users and search engines. A short and sharp URL gives users (and search engine bots) a good hint of what to expect on a webpage. How does this work? It’s simple really.
Keep your URLs stripped to essentials – remove filler words and stay focused on the core subject. For instance, if we’ve a post about “URL structure best practices”, we might choose to say it compactly as “url-best-practices” rather than an overly long phrase. Remember, shorter URLs are easy to recall and share, and they’re more likely to show in full in search results!
Use Keywords Wisely
Keywords in URLs have been a staple SEO tactic since the dawn of SEO. It just makes sense. So be sure to use a keyword phrase in your URLs that are also mirrored in your page title and H1.
Adding the right keywords can significantly improve your search engine visibility. But always err on the side of caution – keyword stuffing won’t do you any favours. Instead of shoving numerous keywords into the slug, pick a single keyword for the URL and let the page content direct the rest of the conversation.
Utilise Hyphens as Word Separators
When creating multi-word URLs, use hyphens to separate words, as Google recommends them to help users and search engines identify the words.
This tip might seem elementary, but you’ll be surprised at the number of URLs that use underscores or spaces. An underscore can be hard to see when the URL is underlined, whereas spaces can show up as %20 in the address bar. Underscores are valid URL characters, though, and don’t make a URL malformed or cause indexing issues by themselves.
Avoid Special Characters and Symbols
When structuring your URLs, take care with special characters like question marks, apostrophes, and exclamation points. They aren’t automatically an indexing issue, but a question mark, for example, starts the query string. So, stick with readable words in your audience’s language and numerals, and hyphens for word separation – remember, simplicity is king!
Use Lowercase Letters
Last but not least, use lowercase letters when creating new URLs. The scheme and hostname are case-insensitive, but paths and query components can be case-sensitive, so uppercase letters can lead to duplicate versions of a page if both variants serve the same content.
/example-page and /Example-Page are treated as 2 different URLs by Google.
Developers can implement redirects that send an uppercase URL variant to its lowercase counterpart, provided both represent the same page. This is a great solution if you’re dealing with many instances of camel casing. Check that the lowercase destination works before applying the redirect.
Common URL issues
Some of the common issues that may pop up with URLs involve underscores, camel casing, non-ASCII characters, malformed URLs, and unnecessary parameters. Underscores and non-ASCII characters aren’t errors by themselves, but it helps to know how to handle them. Here’s a bit more on what those are:
Underscores in URLs
Splitting the words in your URLs with underscores might seem like a practical idea, but it’s not exactly advantageous. Keywords separated by underscores (_) are valid in URLs, but Google recommends hyphens to help users and search engines identify the separate words.
Programmers and developers might be accustomed to using underscores, but in the SEO world, it’s hyphens all day.
That said, URL parameters can freely contain underscores, and so can URL paths.
Camel Casing
URL paths are case-sensitive. If you have URLs where both lowercase and uppercase page variants are accessible, indexable and serving the same content, Google treats them as distinct URLs. You can use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version, but Google may choose a different canonical.
The best way to avoid this when creating new URLs is to use lowercase paths. If you already have uppercase variants serving the same page, you can set up a 301 redirect to the lowercase counterpart. Check the destination first, and don’t automatically lowercase paths or parameter values that your site treats as different.
Non-ASCII Characters
A non-ASCII character is any character that is outside of the ASCII character set, which includes English letters, numbers and basic punctuation. Think things like accented vowels.
When Non-ASCII characters get linked in HTML, they should be percent-encoded in the link’s href attribute. This is how characters such as accented vowels are represented in the URL, rather than a miscommunication between user expectation and browser interpretation.
Although it’s possible to use non-ASCII characters in URLs, I’d suggest sidestepping encoding issues by checking that the characters are correctly encoded, rather than avoiding non-ASCII characters altogether.
Malformed URLs
Malformed URLs are a recipe for bad SEO as these are URLs that contain incorrect formatting, such as invalid percent encoding. A typo can also send users to the wrong path without making the URL malformed. All of these things can unintentionally alter your URL’s behaviour, leading to crawling, indexing and ultimately ranking issues.
As an example of how encoding works, spaces in URL paths are encoded as %20, which doesn’t make the URL malformed. Ampersands (&) are frequently used to separate parameters. If an ampersand is part of a parameter value, encode it as %26 so it isn’t mistaken for a separator. Use the right encoding to prevent your URLs from becoming malformed.
Unnecessary Parameters
URL paths should direct users to a specific resource on your website, and each element of the path should contribute to that purpose. Parameters sit in the query string rather than the path, but should also serve a purpose, such as filtering or sorting.
Unnecessary parameters can lengthen your URLs and create a large number of crawl paths for Google, leading to crawl bloat and potential indexation errors.
Be sure to properly handle your URL parameters. The best way to get a handle on what you need to do, is to check Google Search Console. Look for any parameters Google is unnecessarily crawling, then check what those URLs return before deciding what to block in your robots.txt file. Keep useful pages accessible, and consider canonicalisation for duplicate pages. Robots.txt controls crawling, so it won’t reliably remove a URL from search results. If that’s the goal, use noindex and allow Googlebot to crawl the page so it can see the rule.
Conclusion
It’s clear that URL best practices play a fundamental role in shaping the success of your web applications. They’re not just about aesthetics or ease of use, they’re pivotal in the grander scheme of SEO, user experience, and maintenance.
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