A Complete Guide to Search Engine-Friendly URLs

What is a URL?

URL is an abbreviation for Universal Resource Locator. The URL specifies the location of a document or web page.

The Anatomy of a URL

A URL consists of several parts; based on the example above, these are:

Protocol: https://

Subdomein: www.

Domein: voorbeeld.nl

Directory: over

Pagina: smartranking

Parameter: ?teamlid=

Fragment: laurens

What is a search engine-friendly URL?

Google says the following: A search engine-friendly URL is short, descriptive, readable, and consistent. The URL’s structure should be logical.

From the very beginning, it’s important to think carefully about this structure. When building your URLs, think about what content you have and plan to post, and organize it into a structure. This ensures a logical structure for your URLs and makes sure they’re optimized for search engine optimization.

What should I keep in mind when creating a search engine-friendly URL?

The URL should be readable, short, descriptive, and consistent. But what exactly should you keep in mind? We’ll explain this to you step by step:

Descriptive and readable URL

A URL is readable and descriptive when a visitor can tell from the URL what the page is about. Searchers are more likely to click on readable and descriptive URLs in search results.

Example of a good URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/diensten/zoekmachine-optimalisatie

Example of a bad URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/blog/diensten/zoek-opti-id=7642

Keywords in the URL

Always include one or two important keywords in the URL. This helps search engines better understand what the page is about. Don’t cram the URL full of keywords. This is considered “over-optimization.” It makes the URL unnecessarily long and unreadable.

So be careful with this. Google penalizes this practice, and besides, it doesn’t improve the readability of your URL.

Grammar in the URL

Although grammar is a point of debate, the majority of SEO specialists say that grammar doesn’t matter in URLs. But a URL with poor grammar or spelling errors is, of course, less readable.

Example of a good URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/zoekmachine-optimalisatie/

Example of a bad URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/zoekmachine-optimalizatie/

Do not use parameters in the URL

You can’t always avoid parameters in the URL, but you should do so whenever possible. Parameters offer no added value to visitors or to Google. They don’t provide any context to a URL and can sometimes cause duplicate content.

Example of an incorrect URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/index?product=123

Example of a good URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/product-seo

Use hyphens in the URL

Use the hyphen (-) to separate words in the URL. Even though (_) underscores are readable by search engines, they are not easy for a visitor to read. Furthermore, there is a greater chance of typos.

Keep URLs short

A long URL is a bad URL. Always try to keep URLs as short as possible. Long URLs are harder to read for both Google and visitors.

As a rule of thumb, a URL should not be longer than 5 words. Google assigns less value to a page with a URL that is too long, so it will rank slightly lower in search results.

Example of a bad URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/het-beste-zoekmachine-optimalisatie-traject-vind-je-bij-ons

Example of a good URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/zoekmachine-optimalsatie-smartranking

Be consistent with the URLs

First, think about what content you have before you start building URLs.

Do you have a “Services” section and a “Blog” section? If so, be sure to make use of them.

Think carefully about how you want to structure the URLs so that they make sense. Above all, stay consistent.

Example of a good URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/diensten/zoekmachine-optimalisatie

Example of a bad URL:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/blog/diensten/zoekmachine

Group all URLs

A short URL is a good URL. But how do you make a URL short? We recommend that you always organize URLs into directories.

Do you have a large website? In that case, you often can’t organize it using just one directory. Use subdirectories to organize everything. Be sure to use as few directories as possible and keep directory names short for the URLs.

Examples of good URLs:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/diensten/SEO

Examples of bad URLs:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/diensten-die-wij-aanbieden/zoekmachine-optimalisatie

Information Architecture

Information architecture is a key part of this. Among other things, it clarifies the relationships between pages. And you specify which directories should be assigned a URL.

If you develop this structure, it will immediately provide clarity for everyone. In addition, you’ll force yourself to think carefully about all the URLs—not just now, but for the future as well.

Did you set everything up properly from the very beginning? If so, you won’t need to use 301 redirects in the future. Your URLs will already be properly grouped.

Fragments in URLs

You use anchors to go to a specific section of the page. An example of this is:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/team/#laurens

The ” # ” is the fragment, and the fragment identifier is laurens in this example. Our tip is: don’t overuse fragments, and make sure they’re readable.

Capital Letters in URLs

URLs are case-sensitive. This means that:

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/VOORBEELD

and

https://www.voorbeeld.nl/voorbeeld

are treated as two different URLs. Use only lowercase letters in your URL. This helps prevent typos, duplicate content, and the indexing of multiple URLs.

Trailing slash or not?

Decide in advance whether you want a slash at the end of the URL or not (the trailing slash). Would you like a URL with a slash? If so, use a 301 redirect to redirect all URLs without a slash to the URL with a slash at the end. This works just as well in reverse. This way, you’ll avoid a trailing slash issue and prevent duplicate content.

Extensions or not?

You can choose to add an extension to a URL. For example:

• .php
• .html
• .aspx

Still, this does involve a risk. Do you plan to migrate in the future? If so, the SEO migration will become more complex and risky. Furthermore, you’re making the URL unnecessarily long, it looks less professional, and you’re increasing the chance of typos.

Creating Links

URLs are also used to create links. You can link to a page using a relative URL or an absolute URL. A relative URL is a URL that does not include the protocol, subdomain, or domain. For example: /over-ons/team/

An absolute URL refers to the full URL, including the protocol, subdomain, and domain; for example: https://www.smartranking/over-ons/team/

We recommend linking to relative URLs. That way, if you change domains, you won’t have to update all your links. Please note: it is not recommended to use relative URLs as canonical URLs.

Would you like to use a specific URL as a backlink for, say, a press release or a link-building campaign? If so, use the full URL that Google needs to index—not a URL with a redirect or canonical tag pointing to another page.

Be consistent and plan ahead

It should be clear that, above all, you need to be consistent. Think things through carefully from the very beginning, plan your content, and set up your URL structure based on that. This will help you avoid having to set up unnecessary 301 redirects in the future.