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There’s nothing sexy about talking website URL’s — so I won’t pretend there is.
But — better website rankings, more targeted website traffic and more sales is very SEXY — and optimizing your web pages for search engine traffic can make these things happen.
Your URL file names (believe it or not) can give you a good boost in the search engines when done in combination with things like optimizing the alt text on your images, optimizing title tags and cross linking your website.
What Does An Optimized URL Look Like?
Remember that Google (and the others) is looking for clues about the content of a web page when it “crawls” the page. Using descriptive file names is just one more way to let Google know what the page is about.
Example 1:
http://www.russhenneberry.com/?p=91
This file name doesn’t tell Google anything, zero SEO benefit for this puppy.
Example 2:
http://www.russhenneberry.com/tiny-action-mighty-payoff
This filename is better because it is descriptive, but it doesn’t take an SEO genius to know that very few (if any) people are searching Google for ‘tiny action mighty payoff’
Example 3
A little bit of keyword research will tell you that there is a reasonably high volume of searches for the term ‘optimizing website url’s’
http://www.russhenneberry.com/optimizing-website-urls/
We have a winner!
How To Optimize Website URL’s
If you are using an SEO friendly Content Management System like WordPress, you simply type the file name of the URL that you would like — click OK and move on with your life.
Editing Web Page URL's in WordPress is Easy
If your website is not using an SEO friendly CMS or your website was custom coded — you may need to contact your web professional to find out how to optimize your website URL’s.
IMPORTANT: Optimizing website URL’s that are already on your website is not recommended. There are technical issues that go beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that suddenly changing the URL’s on existing website files could have a damaging effect on your rankings. What IS recommended is optimizing the website pages that you product from this point forward.
If you plan on redesigning your website, be sure that the new designer has a good grasp of SEO.
What questions do you have about optimizing website URL’s? What advice do you have for the rest of us?
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