How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs

Jillean Kearney
Jillean Kearney
Nov 30, 2014

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.

Back to All Articles
Back to All Articles
Nov 30, 2014

How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs

Jillean Kearney

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.

About the Author
Jillean Kearney

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