Your web pages’ URL structure, or simply, their web address, is important for search engine ranking purposes. It isn’t the most important thing, and it isn’t irrelevant, either. Your pages’ URL structures can be made so that they help your rankings rather than just sitting there and doing nothing but being an address.

Should you have keywords in your URL structure? Yes. It won’t hurt and can only help. Consider your URL structure as an important part of a user-oriented design. Your URL structure is a key part of the usability of your site. Your site’s information architecture is how the information is grouped and categorized on a site. If you start out with a logical architecture covering your home page and all the pages within, your site will be easier to navigate for human readers and for search engine crawlers.

It’s common sense. If your page on, say, the Louis Vuitton Keepall 55 carry-on luggage has a URL structure like “http://www.yoursitename.com/designer goods/luggage/carry-on-luggage/Louis-Vuitton-Keepall-55″ it is easy for users and search bots to figure out what that page is all about because you’ve described it in ever-increasing detail as you progress from the home page to the specific page.

However, keep in mind that search engines are limited in the number of characters in a URL that they’ll crawl. Shorter URLs that don’t look like dynamic URLS (which are full of special characters and hard to remember) and that are shorter and to the point are a great investment in the future of your site’s search engine ranking.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 12:16 am and is filed under Domains and URLs, Keywords, SEO, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.