Most businesses focus on incorporating targeted keywords into their content to boost search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. And, with good reason—keywords help you appear among the top on search engine results pages (SERPs).
But, contrary to common belief, they’re not the only contributing factor to SEO. You also need to optimize your URL for SEO—search engines use URLs to understand what a page is about. Your chances of ranking among the top skyrocket if you have well-structured and accurate URLs.
Fortunately, optimizing URLs for SEO isn’t brain surgery. It’s something you can perfect in a short time with proper guidance. And, Bitly is all about empowering clients.
Here’s an in-depth look at SEO-friendly URLs and how to create them for maximum search engine traffic.
What is a URL?
When it comes to a properly optimized URL, the first step is knowing the difference between a URL and a domain name.
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is used to reference the location of a web resource on a computer network and the mechanism used to retrieve it. On the other hand, a domain name is merely a part of your URL.
Here’s an example of a URL to better understand its anatomy:
https://bitly.com/blog/qr-code-rsvp/
In this example:
- The https:// is the scheme, which guides servers on the protocol to use to access a page on your site.
- The bitly part is the domain name, which shows visitors they’re on your brand’s site.
- The .com is the top-level domain (TLD), which typically shows the type of entity you’ve registered your business as on the Internet.
- The / is the path.
- The blog is a subfolder or subdirectory that shows web crawlers and site visitors which part of your website they’re on.
- The qr-code-rsvp is the slug, which serves as a page’s unique identifier.
When creating a website, an SEO-friendly URL is essential for properly optimizing your page for search engines like Google. It helps ensure your target audience can find you.
Why do URLs matter for SEO?
Many see keywords as the only aspect of successful SEO. URL optimization is an essential, yet often overlooked, part of getting an edge over your competitors.
Effective URL optimization allows you to take advantage of the following benefits:
- Search engine-friendly URLs are a ranking factor and, therefore, impact where your site exists in search results.
- They make your site easier for visitors to navigate. This can impact how long someone spends on your site and how many pages they click through, which can also improve your SEO.
- Search engine crawlers make connections between pages through their URLs, ensuring even more SEO juice for your website.
While SEO-friendly links are not the be-all and end-all of SEO or even the most important part of it, it’s vital not to neglect a strong SEO URL as part of your online strategy.
With Bitly, you can measure your URLs’ effectiveness to determine whether they need adjustments. Through your account, you get detailed analytics:
- Clicks over time
- Clicks by referrer
- Top performing by clicks
- Clicks by location
This information can help you gauge engagement and click-through rate (CTR). If your engagement and CTR are low, you likely need to do more to make your link more SEO-friendly.
How to spot an SEO-friendly URL
Sometimes, you can tell how SEO-friendly a URL is by looking at it. SEO-friendly URLs typically have a simple structure and contain descriptive keywords that allow site visitors to decipher what they lead to. They also clearly indicate the content on their pages, contain hyphens (-) to separate words and make them easier to read, and are short. These qualities enhance visitors’ experiences and make it easy for web crawlers to index pages.
You can optimize different parts of a URL to make it more SEO-friendly. For the scheme, use https instead of http, as the former creates a more secure connection—while this isn’t a direct ranking factor, it’s a technical signal that Google uses to determine page ranking.
For the domain, use a name that reflects your brand or is relevant to your content. Overly complex or unrelated domains can impact your ranking.
For the slug, incorporate keywords and separate them with hyphens to make them more readable. Avoid stop words like “the” and “but,” as they don’t add any value to your URL—they only make it bulky. The simpler your URL, the better for SEO.
Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the most critical elements an SEO-friendly URL should have.
Keywords
You likely already know how vital it is to incorporate keywords into your content. But only a few people know that keywords are also vital in URLs. They tell web crawlers and site visitors what your link contains even before they open it and can, therefore, determine whether they click it.
Use relevant keywords in your URL. If you’re running a promotion campaign, you can use promotion as your keyword, as it shows what your page contains.
Bitly allows you to customize your URLs to reflect their purpose. You can add your preferred keyword at the end of your links as you shorten your long URLs to indicate the content on your pages.
URL length
A browser’s address bar can hold up to 2,048 characters. But, just because it can doesn’t mean it should. While it may be tempting to be as detailed as possible in your URLs, this will hurt your SEO ranking more than it’ll help. Opt for short URLs with descriptive keywords instead.
Bitly helps clients maintain appropriate URL lengths by removing all non-essential characters. Shortened links typically contain 10–30 characters, just enough to indicate your page’s content without being too overwhelming.
Readability
You need to find a balance between brevity and conciseness when creating your URLs. Readability is vital for successful SEO, as it makes it easier for search engines to understand your URLs and visitors to remember and share them. The latter can result in increased web traffic.
Improve your URLs’ readability by keeping them short. Here are some examples of how Bitly promotes readability while still maintaining the essence of the linked content:
- https://www.example.com/deals/special-offers-winter-sale: If shortened through Bitly, the link would be something like: https://bit.ly/winter-sale-deals. The new link is more concise.
Now for a real-life example:
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2022/02/10/amtrak-deal-valentines-offer-sale/6741296001/ becomes https://bit.ly/amtrak-valentines. The latter is more readable and, as such, can promote your SEO efforts. It can also allow you to expand marketing efforts to character-limited channels like social media and SMS.
15 Best practices for creating SEO-friendly URLs
When crafting your SEO strategy, it’s essential to consider the areas your competitors overlook. We’ve compiled a series of SEO URL best practices to help you take your site to the next level.
1. Match URLs to a page title
The best URL structure for SEO success is to have your URL correspond with the content on your website. Your URL is one of the first things search engine crawlers examine.
Most website administrators match URLs to page titles naturally. But it’s a good idea to double-check that your URL and page title have the same search intent.
2. Keep URLs simple
Simplicity is a vital SEO best practice. Remove unnecessary words from your URLs to enable both humans and machines to understand your pages’ content at a mere glance. For instance, common words such as “and” and “the” can be removed.
Here’s an example of how this might work in practice:
https://www.bitly.com/blog/how-to-optimize-url-structure-for-seo
vs.
https://www.bitly.com/blog/optimize-url-structure-for-seo
See the difference?
The second example still uses the same keywords but removes any extra words that don’t add meaning. A human can look at the second URL and immediately know what they will see when following the link.
3. Create descriptive URLs
Google’s complex algorithms rely on accessibility and usability. The more descriptive a URL is and readable for a human, the better it is for Google.
Use a descriptive domain relevant to your brand and what it does to maximize readability. It should be direct, to the point, and easy to remember.
4. Stick to lowercase letters
Readability is essential in any good SEO URL. To improve your search engine rankings, avoid using uppercase letters.
Mixing in uppercase and lowercase letters reduces readability and makes your URL look messy, creating a sense of distrust around your site. The structure can also confuse search engine crawlers and visitors. Particularly when it comes to memorability, capital letters tend to complicate things.
5. Eliminate punctuation from URLs
Search engine-friendly URLs will never include punctuation. While punctuation is acceptable and necessary for page titles and meta descriptions, it tends to be confusing in URLs. It can make it harder for visitors to remember your URL and for crawlers to decipher the intent of your links.
6. Avoid adding subfolders to your URLs
Part of making URLs as readable and friendly as possible involves making them short, straightforward, and to the point. Keeping too many subfolders can prevent you from achieving this.
Remove unnecessary subfolders, as they make it harder for search engines to crawl your site. Pay particular attention if you use web builders like WordPress, as they automatically use the subfolder location as the default URL.
7. Use hyphens, remove underscores
Breaking up words within your URLs with hyphens improves readability for your target audience and search engines.
One of the most hotly contested debates in the SEO URL world is whether hyphens or underscores are the preferred option for Google.
Google prefers hyphens to underscores. The search engine does not see hyphens and underscores as interchangeable. Hyphens are viewed as word separators, whereas underscores are word joiners. So, underscores may make your page harder to index correctly and, therefore, more difficult for your target audience to find.
8. Use a primary keyword
Using keywords is one of the most essential steps to improve SEO. If you can insert a relevant keyword somewhere, it’ll greatly benefit your optimization.
When creating SEO-friendly URLs, do your best to include the primary keyword. Consider your primary keyword for each specific page, and use it somewhere in your URLs.
9. Stay away from dynamic parameters
A dynamic URL is simply a URL that runs a script. The easiest way to spot these is to look for special symbols within the URL. You’ll often see them on e-commerce websites.
While they allow flexibility and scalability, they aren’t the best options for SEO. Static URLs have the upper hand as they’re short and clear, and reduce the risk of duplicate content, allowing search engines to index pages more appropriately.
If you have dynamic links, use Bitly’s URL shortener to remove the dynamic parameters and make your URL more SEO-friendly.
10. Use canonical tags where needed
If your website has different versions of the same page, you need to make sure Google doesn’t index each version as a separate page.
Different versions could include:
These URLs all lead to the same place, so it’s important to make sure Google sees these links as consolidated. A backlink from one of the above URLs should count for all page versions.
Using the canonical tag on each variation of the same page communicates to Google that all versions should be considered the same URL. A canonical tag is an HTML element that prevents duplicate content problems.
11. Manage redirects with care
Search engine-friendly URLs keep redirects to a minimum or eliminate them entirely. Removing redirects speeds up loading times and improves visitor experiences, increasing their chances of staying on your website for longer. This information is shared with Google and can improve your ranking.
Sometimes, search engines won’t follow the redirects correctly, if at all. That means an entire webpage (and the time you spent building it) can go completely to waste. So, if you can, avoid them.
If you can’t, use a 301 redirect rather than a temporary redirect. 301 redirects transfer 90-99% of ranking power to the new page, so Google won’t penalize you for inserting a necessary redirect.
12. Choose the right domain names for future websites
Anyone familiar with the domain name market knows that certain domain names can cost thousands of dollars to purchase. There’s a reason for this.
Many premium domain names are already stuffed full of keywords naturally. Shorter domains featuring commonly searched keywords will always rank better.
While this is less important than it used to be (and certainly no reason to ditch your current domain), it’s something to keep in mind when setting up future websites.
Side note: when it comes to your closest competitors, Google will often differentiate between them using brand queries. If your domain name is a closer match for the query you’re trying to rank for, this will give your site an extra push.
13. Futureproof your URLs
It’s not uncommon for particular pages, especially blogs, to contain a date. For example, if you’re writing about top SEO tips that are relevant right now, you may include “2023” or “2024” in the title.
Just because you include it in the post title doesn’t mean it should be featured in the URL. This can cause your page to become outdated, so be sure to futureproof your URLs by avoiding dates.
As your post gets older, you can update it with evergreen content to keep it relevant. By leaving the date out of your SEO URL structure, you can keep the same URL and all the link juice that goes with it for longer.
14. To trailing slash or not to trailing slash?
It may seem like a relatively insignificant issue, but the constant debate rages on over whether URLs should contain the trailing slash.
The trailing slash is often seen at the end of URLs and looks like this: “/.”
For years, Google’s position on the trailing slash was unclear. But Google has reaffirmed repeatedly that the choice is up to you. The trailing slash has no impact on your ranking.
Although best practices indicate that you should use the trailing slash, this is one of those rare occasions where the trailing slash can be ignored. Google’s own URLs don’t contain the trailing slash.
Our advice is to maintain consistency in your use of the trailing slash. If you use it on your home page, use it on all your other pages as well. If you don’t use it on one page, leave it out on your other pages. It’s also wise to consolidate both versions of your trailing slash/no trailing slash page with a canonical tag.
15. Use custom URLs
With some links, it’s not always possible to follow SEO URL best practices. Sometimes, URL structure may be out of your hands. For example, you may lack complete control over the subfolders on your website if you integrate it with third-party services. This typically happens on e-commerce sites, where vendors have the power to create their own subfolders.
So, what do you do in this situation?
Take advantage of branded links instead. Branded links have a strong SEO URL structure that can help bypass the lack of URL control.
By using a branded short URL, you can include a custom domain and slash tag. Instead of a random string of characters that will only deter site visitors, you can create a link that meets all the requirements of URL SEO.
Build your SEO URL with Bitly
Your URLs do more than just direct audiences to your website. They also impact your SEO ranking, making their optimization vital.
Bitly simplifies the process of creating SEO-friendly URLs. You can shorten long URLs to make them more concise and SEO-friendly, and customize them by adding unique page identifiers to make it easier for web crawlers and site visitors to decipher your page content. You can also assess your click rates through the Bitly Connections Platform to gauge your site’s traffic.
Sign up for a Bitly account today to optimize your URLs for SEO and enjoy better rankings!