What is the best URL structure for SEO?

It is surprising how many places avoid these simple rules. On big website projects it is considered so easy that it is often left to the last minute and then people end up inheriting the default settings of a CMS. E-commerce sites are a slightly different beast altogether, yet all places that are still in business are now offering descriptive URL’s.

Rule 1 – use words rather than numbers.

Rule 2 – keep it lower case, you will be saving yourself a lot of grief down the road.

Rule 3 – use hyphens to separate-out-words for readability reasons. Do not go down the route of the _.

Rule 4 – avoid repetition, although on a big 15,000 pages content led CMS this can be tricky.

Rule 5 – keep it short and sweet, see point above to realise sometimes this just isn’t possible.

Rule 6 – keep the important stuff at the start

Rule 7 – avoid the extra parameters spewed out from dynamic pages

Rule 8 – subdomains eat up your link juice. Even though every stakeholder wants a subdomain, unless it’s for a UAT environment try to avoid it.

Rule 9 – avoid duplicates. You can go down the canonical route, however where possible keep it simple!

It’s best to master the basics yourself to avoid you paying an agency to highlight that you haven’t mastered the basics.