What Are SEO-Friendly URLs? Tips to Create & Check Them

Have you ever wondered, what is an SEO-friendly URL? How to create it and check if the URL is SEO friendly? Well, I will cover all of this and more in this detailed guide.

Notably, well–optimized URLs are crucial in search engine optimization, and also provide a good user experience. Search engine algorithms look into many factors while trying to rank a web page higher on the SERPs, and URLs are certainly one of them. Also known as “Pretty URLs” they allow the users and search engines to know what the web page is about, thus it is important to optimize them carefully. This is to say, the URLs must be well-structured, precise, correct and appealing/clickable.

URL optimization is one of the best SEO practices that cannot be ignored. URLs are the basis of a website, and optimizing them can help you get more traffic to your website. Typically, a URL performs better on search engines if it is easy to understand and looks reliable because it tends to get more shares. An optimized URL can help websites do more than just rank. How, let me discuss in detail here about SEO-friendly URLs.

What is a URL?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which mentions the web address of the page. Therefore, every page on the internet has a unique URL. This uniqueness is gained from the domain name and the characters that are used in the URL.

This is to say that the web page URL has two parts, the first part is the domain, which cannot be changed. And the second part is the directory to find the page within this domain, and this is the part that can be modified for SEO purposes.

What is an SEO-Friendly URLs?

In simple words, an SEO friendly URLs refers to one that uses plain text and keywords which make it easier for the users as well as search engines to understand what the web page is about. These links make it easier to rank as they meet the search engine ranking criteria. Thus a precise URL, and keyword-rich, is generally considered SEO-friendly and a ‘Pretty URL”.

But when we talk about SEO, it goes beyond the use of keywords, search engines consider many factors while ranking websites on the search results. And URLs are certainly one of them.

An optimized URL is short, contains the keyword, and is easy to understand by both web crawlers as well as human users. Hence provides a better user experience and is easy to share. Thus an SEO friendly URL can result in higher page ranking on the search results.

Importance of URLs in SEO

As I’ve discussed earlier in this article, SEO-friendly URLs do impact ranking on search engines. It is important to add relevant keywords to improve the search engine visibility of the web page, which helps in gaining more traffic and indeed helps with ranking.

URLs, sometimes also refereed as permalinks are also crucial because unlike page titles or descriptions, you cannot change them later, and even if you do, it will hurt the SEO efforts, and you even require technical experts to do so, so it will also cost you money.

On your website, you must have a URL structure which is easy to remember for the users, and something search engines can relate to the web page content.
Search engines considers many URL factors such as – URL length, URL directory/path, URL keywords, and URL string while considering a URL SEO friendly.

Here are some of the reasons why SEO-friendly URLs matters in SEO:

Having an SEO-friendly URLs improves click-through rates. The URL is one of the first things users see in the search results. So if the URL structure is right you will have an increased click-through rate.

An SEO-friendly URL helps in gaining trust among the visitors, and also reduces doubts, as it aims to provide a better user experience. They appear safe and are usually easy to remember. Most importantly SEO-friendly URLs makes search results more relevant. When they are properly structured, it is easier for the web crawlers to crawl and index the content. It helps in improving the traffic, which boosts the SEO ranking.

Best Practices To Make An SEO-Friendly URLs

Now let’s talk about how to make an URLs SEO-friendly. It is quite easy, and you can even check if the URL is SEO-friendly, which we will talk about later.

Here are some of the best practices to follow to create an SEO-friendly URL:

Make Sure to Use HTTPS Protocol: HTTPS protocol has been made mandatory by Google, moreover web browsers show warnings these days for non secure pages. Thus HTTPS websites are considered safe by Google. The HTTPS protects sensitive information of visitors from malicious use. It is also one of the ranking factors. So if you are still using a website with HTTP, it is about time you switch to HTTPS. You can encrypt the website with an SSL certificate. Most of the hosting providers will help you get an SSL certificate free of cost.
Use the Keywords: Each web page on your website domain must have a reason. It could be informational, transactional, or administrative. Adding keywords to the URL makes it possible for the users to easily find out the pages when it matches the search intent. Also, it makes it easier for the users and search engines to understand what the page is about. So, you must do some keyword research and add relevant keywords to the URL. It helps in making the URL more descriptive, try including it closer to the root domain. Having said that, avoid keyword stuffing in the URLs for sure. So you should not use a keyword in an unnatural way or even more than once.
Avoid Using Sub-Domains: Considering from an SEO perspective it does not matter whether you use www as your subdomain or not. As a matter of fact, using www does not have any effect on the SEO of your site, so it is unimportant.Besides, not using sub-domain like www will make the URL shorter, and clearer. So it is easier to type and remember. From an SEO perspective, you can use subfolders, as it is safer than subdomains. Further putting your website in a subdomain i.e. subdomain.yourwebsite.tld is also not a good practice.
Avoid Special Characters: While creating an SEO-friendly URL special characters should not be used. Not because they are useless characters that are inappropriate here. It is a good SEO practice to not to use special characters in URLs for a good user experience, and to keep things simple. By adding commas, brackets, spaces, colons, etc. you are unnecessarily complicating the structure. And it gets difficult to recognize the URL. Thus avoiding special characters help make the structure easy to remember and simple.
Use Hyphens to Separate Words: Google focuses on providing a good user experience. The simpler a URL is to read for the users, the better the user-friendliness. Besides, make sure to not use the underscore as a separator. Thus using an underscore is considered a bad SEO practice. This is to say that search engines only consider using separators in the URL as a good SEO practice. Notably, they help in improving the readability.
Do Not Use Numbers: When you add dates or numbers in the permalink you are not only adding to the length but it is also irrelevant information for the search engines. A better SEO practice is to remove numbers from the URLs until it is necessary like in the case of date archives. Thus you will not have to update the URL in case you make a few changes to the web page.
Lowercase, Uppercase, and Space in the URL: While creating URLs make sure to use lowercase letters along with hyphens. For technical purposes, you should avoid using uppercase letters too. Besides, keeping the URL consistent throughout the website is also important. Try to keep things simple, Google loves it that way. Google is constantly updating its algorithms keeping users its priority. Therefore it is crucial to prioritize users while creating URLs.
Use Static URLs: It is a good SEO practice to use static URLs as much as possible, which means fixed URLs. These are the URLs that are invariable, meaning they do not change each time the page loads. Also try not to use useless parameters like ‘?’, ‘!’, ‘#’, “&’,’=’, etc in permanent URLs, which are usually used in dynamic URLs. Static URLs are easy to read for the users as well as web crawlers. Having said that, you may add additional parameters to the URLs, especially while posting to social media platforms and tracking the marketing efforts. But avoid heavy-coding dynamic URLs straightway to the website.

How to Check if the Website URL is SEO-Friendly?

You can check if the web page URL is SEO-friendly using an SEO checker tool like DefiniteSEO. It is a powerful website checker tool which is very easy to use. Its advance set of tools check your web page or website for different SEO parameters. Based upon the analysis it assigns the web page an SEO score. Once you have the SEO report you can optimize the website based upon the results and SEO suggestions the tool provides.

Step. 1
To check whether the URL is SEO-friendly you need to simply copy and paste the URL in the given space and click on the ‘Analyze’ button.

Step. 2
Next, the tool will run an in-depth website analysis and provide you with the a report. Now go to the On-Page SEO section. Here under Common SEO, you can find an SEO-Friendly URL report. Based upon the SEO results you can do the needful changes if needed.

Conclusion

Having an SEO-friendly URL for your website is a good practice that you need to follow. Mainly because it is easy for the users and search engines to understand, and also because it makes navigation easier. While SEO-friendly URLs are not a direct ranking factor, it does affect the user experience, which affects the web traffic and click-through rate. By optimizing the website URL you are not just making it convenient for the users to understand the web page, but also signalling the search engines about the relevance and value of the content. URLs are a part of technical SEO and it is crucial to optimize them. So when bots crawl and index your site they can understand better from the URL structure.