URL structures and its impact in SEO

URL is a readable text which was designed to replace the IP Address (IP Numbers) that computer use to communicate with server and get into a specified place or an address. URL also identifies the file structure of the given website. 

Guidelines to follow while working with URL :

1. Making the URL as possible as short and understandable.
2. Using hyphens instead of underscore and other stuffs.
3. Using parameters should be avoided and if used then must be kept low as possible, like two or less than it.

The URL demonstrates the search engine and visitors what the content likely is, so keeping URL relevant and accurate to the content provides higher chance in ranking top or atleast at a better place. Now lets us see the example below, where we have briefly explained it comparing two urls:

URL:http://example.com/product/iphone-5s.html

Seeing this URL a user can easily say it is a ecommerce website with a product review and product name is iphone-5s. It is simple to understand and it has more SEO friendly URL.

URL: http://example.com/2013-05-08/69i57j0l5.3166j0j4&sourceid=iphone+5s+review&start=90.html

               This URL is very messy and neither a search engine nor an user can understand it well, and this URL’s end in the last page of search engine index. If shown a little early, then also a user thinks twice before clicking the link as he has no idea where might the page land him to.

There are five tips to achieve an SEO-friendly site URL structure

Combine your www and the non-www domain versions: According to rule, there are two major versions of your domain indexed in the search engines, one is www and another is non-www version. These can be combine in more than one way.MostlySEOs use the 301 redirectto point one version (www) of their site to the other (non-www) or vice versa.In another way (if you can’t do a redirect), you can identify your preferred version in Google Webmaster Tools in Configuration >> Settings >> Preferred Domain. But there is some drawback: This takes care of Google only. This option is restricted to root domains only.

Avoid dynamic and relative URLs: Depending on your CMS, the URL may be like this one www.example.com/item-name (good) or www.example.com/?item-id=123 (not good).

Search engines have no problem with either variation, but for definite reason’s better to use static (good) URLs rather than dynamic (not good) ones. Because, static URLs contain your keywords and are more user-friendly.

Create an XML Sitemap: XML Sitemap is the list of your site's URLs that you submit to the search engines. XML Sitemap helps search engines to find your site's more easily and use sitemap as a reference when choosing canonical URLs on your site.

Close off irrelevant pages with robots.txt: Some page having most sensitive information, must be hidden from the search engines like 'Terms and conditions' page.

So robotx.txt file contains instructions for the search engine as to what pages your site should be ignored during the crawl.

Specify canonical URLs using a special tag: To highlight canonical URLS on your site is done by using the canonical tag. Canonical tag is applied only with the purpose of helping search engine. For navigate of site pages, use redirects and for paginated content employ rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in most cases.

Example:

<link rel="canonical" href=http://www.example.com/index/content?id=234" />

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