Do you know that one of the first things a search engine indexes in a website is its web address? Your web address or URL is like the gateway to your website. If search engines aren’t happy with your URL, chances are they’re going to turn their backs on your website leaving good content, great design and all other SEO efforts wasted.

So, it’s pretty important to spend some quality time when structuring good URLs for your website.

In ‘Choose My Address’ Blog, we attempt to explain everything you need to know about a web address and how you can popularize your website with well formatted URLs.

To begin with, here are three important factors that attribute to a good URL:

1. Keep It Short And Simple: Keeping your URL short makes it easy for searchers to remember them and for you to communicate it to others. Lengthy and dynamic URLs usually contain too many parameters which search engines abhor. For example, using special characters like “=”, “&”, “?” not only look ugly but are confusing and difficult to recall. It is safer to keep your URLs static, simple, clean and both human and machine readable.

2. Use Canonical Script: Many websites have multiple URLs all leading to the same page. If www.mysite.com, mysite.com/, mysite.com, mysite.com/index/html and mysite.come/home.asp all lead to the same home page, Google would index all these URLs resulting in duplicate page content. This can affect your link popularity. What you can do is, redirect all forms of your domain name to a canonical or standard URL  If someone requests for one of the forms, your web server should do a “301 Redirect” to your canonical URL.

3. Don’t Change Once Set: Once URLs are set, it is advisable not to change them. Search engines would have indexed all the pages of your website. So, if you rename or delete a page, you run the risk of visitors to your website receiving an ‘Error 404 – File not found” message. Someone could also have bookmarked your page and when it breaks, they lose confidence in your website. If you need to change your URL for valid reasons, you can once again use the “301 Redirect” code to redirect old pages to new ones.

Implementing these tips not only enhances your website’s usability but also makes it more search engine friendly. Other articles in this blog will give you more insight into URL structuring.