The Learning Center

For every piece of content you create for your website there are a number of things you need to do to make that content search engine friendly. You need to add a keyword rich title, description, meta tags, headers, pictures, and add your keywords to the content. But the often overlooked part of the process is making your URL search engine friendly as well. I’ve seen thousands of URL’s that read something like this. http://www.whateverwebsite.com/article/pg=3. This tells a search engine absolutely nothing about the web page in question. Which means you are missing a great seo opportunity. URL’s are a perfect opportunity to add your keywords which will help you create a search engine friendly URL.

Creating a search engine friendly URL is really not that hard to do. Before you even started writing your article you should have done some basic keyword research so that you could make the article search engine friendly in the first place. Then some of those keywords should have been added to the title to make the title keyword rich. If you did that then you’ve already done what was needed to make your URL search engine friendly. But depending on the program you are using you need to make sure that the URL that is created is the one you want.

Some programs such as wordpress automatically create lousy URL’s. This can be solved though if you like many other people using wordpress use the plugin “All in One SEO”. This simple plugin has an option that lets you choose the way it will create URL’s. For example this post that might have looked like: https://titandigital.com/seo-blog/?p=33&preview=true
will instead look like:
https://titandigital.com/seo-blog/creating-a-search-engine-friendly-url/.

Of course you can see the difference here and so can search engines. The example of what my URL for this post looks like should be the same way you write your own URL’s. It doesn’t really matter what program you are using because most will give you ability to create your own URL’s. It may be just a simple matter of saving the page file with the right name. Also when you create your URL make sure you use dashes between words. Breaking up the words with dashes helps the search engines read each word individually. And don’t use underscores either. It’s my understanding that not every search engine likes underscores. Some don’t care but some do. But they all like dashes so keep it simple.

It seems like a simple enough thing but it can have an impact on your search engine optimization efforts. Of course if you haven’t been making your URL’s search engine friendly up to this point and you have a lot of content already published I wouldn’t go back and change it. It can be a lot of work for pages that have probably already been indexed. Just make the switch on your next piece of content and start creating search engine friendly URL’s from now on.

If you’ve been thinking about using search marketing to market your local business or are already using it but haven’t gotten the results you expected give us a call at 615-890-3600 or use the form to email us. Search marketing works when it’s done right.