How to Structure Your Website URLs? Tips and Suggestions for Beginners

Your company has a great business plan, it has popular products and services, but still, the customers are not rushing in in droves. Why is that happening? It is happening because customers are not looking at the traditional marketing and promotional initiatives you are carrying out. They are spending most of their day on their laptops or their mobile phones looking for information or seeking product reviews. And that is where your brand needs to feature so that it can get those eyeballs that will pull in customers.

There are hundreds of websites created every day. If you wish to stand out among those teeming websites, what do you do? To understand what needs to be done, you need to understand how people look for products and services. They log on to a search engine and put in a search string. Say a user is looking for men’s wallets. They would search with ‘men’s wallets’ on Google or any other search engine. That will show up some results in over hundred matches of that search string. But the user usually selects his choice by clicking on the matches found on the first page of the results. That is why it is important for a company to feature on the first few matches of a search engine results page. The set of strategies that would ensure this is collectively referred to as search engine optimization, or SEO. Let us see a few things you can do while creating or choosing your URL that can boost the SEO efficiency of your website:

• The URL (internet address) of your website should be easily readable by human eyes. That makes it more user-friendly to users, but it also gets a better rank in the search algorithm. For example, www.mywebsite.com/biggest selfie fails/ would be much better than www.mywebsite.com/selfie_AT876_Pic1/, which would, in turn, be more preferred than www.encrypt06n_mywebsite.com/18934nmC08TU/
• Continuing on the choice of URL, it might sometimes be necessary to put dynamic parameters at the end of an URL, mostly to track the traffic to the website. But if possible, they should be avoided. There are several tools available to help you get your URL back in more readable shape.
• Overall, the length of the URL is of no concern to search engines, and they read any number of URL characters. But from sharing or copy-pasting on the part of the user, it can sometimes be an inconvenience. Therefore, having an URL within fifty to sixty characters long is preferable.
• The URL should reflect as much as possible the main idea of the page it links to. For example, if your page is about Colorado Springs SEO Companies, then a URL like https://www.programmableweb.com/profile/cospringsseo would make more sense than a URL with a series of numbers and random alphabets.
• It is not a good idea for a company to have multiple pages with the same, or very similar, content because the possible ranking of each of those pages gets overshadowed by the other. There are often reasons why multiple pages are needed, for instance, one of those would be a printer friendly version, but as far as possible if they can be merged or maybe one page’s URL can have a redirect command to the other page, then the ranking would improve.

So, you are all set to launch your website and are aware of the things to keep in mind. So, you can look for a good SEO company to optimize your content. But now comes the next problem. How do you decide which company would be best for you? Every company has good and bad experiences, so it is impossible to come up with a set of watertight rules, yet it is very much possible to adhere to a set of basic ground rules which are true in all situations. Let us look at three of them:

1. Think local. A company in Colorado Springs would be more comfortable working with a CEO company that operates from and deals with clients of that area, rather than having to deal with a company in a faraway city on phone or Skype.
2. Costs are important, but not at the expense of the quality you get. The best way to get around this conundrum is to take quotations from several companies and then compare the services and timelines they are providing.
3. Customer reviews and testimonials on the websites are a good way to find out if an SEO company is as good as it says, but sometimes these reviews could be synthetically planted. That’s why you need to supplement those reviews by asking the company to give you some names of their previous clients and then speak to those clients directly, preferably in person.