How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs

URLs are an important element of making your site discoverable via search engines and for optimizing click-through rates from result pages.
Optimized URLs are clearly human-readable, and:
- Only use hyphens to separate words
- Avoid the use of parameters (If they're absolutely necessary, limit to two)
As an example, an optimized URL for a category landing page this blog looks like this:
http://www.blog.agilitycms.com/content-mangers/search-engine-optimization
Why URL Format is Important for SEO
Search Engine Rankings
Like page titles, URLs play an important role in on-page SEO because - when well-crafted - they describe a page's content and determine relevancy to search queries. When a user enters a search query into Google, results with relevant keywords in the URL are more likely to be returned than unreadable, keyword-less URLs.
Search Engine Result Click-Through-Rates
A URL should make sense to the human-eye and be easy-to-read. A URL should indicate the subject of a web page. This will help improve user-experience and click-through-rates from search engine results pages.
Anchor Texts
Back-linking is one of the most important elements of off-page optimization. URLs that properly employ the use of keywords and describe a page's content, can be of major benefit to back-linking because it provides the opportunity for the achor text of a link to match words in the URL. Using the above example of the optimized URL for this blog, if someone links "search engine optimization" tohttp://www.blog.agilitycms.com/content-mangers/search-engine-optimization, this will indicate relevancy and quality to the topic of SEO and help boost search rankings for that term.
