How to Make SEO Friendly Urls for Your Blog

Make SEO Friendly Urls for Your Blog

Why do you need to optimize your URL on your website? When a search engine like Google crawls your website one of the first things it checks is the URL of the web page. Having SEO friendly URLs is extremely crucial and now it is a ranking factor. Here, you can find some tips on how to make the URLs of your web pages search engine friendly.

1. Whenever you make any sort of post, you should insert the keyword within the address. For example, this post is about making “SEO friendly URLs“. If you check out, the phrase is inserted in the URL. On the other hand, avoid using “stop words” such as “a”, “an”, “the” etc. These words are unnecessary to understand the context of the article.
2. If you already have articles or posts which you have not optimized for keywords yet, you should find out which is the mostly used keyword. There are quite a lot of tools online which help to find out which is the mostly used keyword in your article. (Check Google for keyword density checker) If you discover, you should use that keyword in your web page address.
3. Another valuable tip you should keep in mind when you make SEO friendly URLs is to avoid using unusual characters. I recommend you to only use words and maximum the “-” character to add space between the words. (Do not use “_” for space, it is not recommended nowadays.) By the way, never use space in the address as it cannot usually be handled by search engines.
4. If you use some sort of scripts which create URL that contains unwanted characters such as %, check out the settings page to change it, if there is no possibility to modifying it, you should make changes in the script.
5. Do not use upper-case letters and numbers, as well.

The best is that if you have the ability to add URL of the page before publishing your content. (For example, in WordPress you can easily make SEO friendly URLs by changing the permalinks settings). If you have already had posted content with a URL you want to change, you must be careful, though. If you change the URL, you will lose all the backlinks which point to that page. If the readers saved that the old webpage address, they cannot access the page in the future. On top of that having broken URLs on your website is critical for SEO. In order to avoid losing traffic, you should redirect the old page address to the new one. This can be easily done by 301 redirection.
Overall, making your URLs SEO friendly is a truly critical step for search engine optimization. If you have not done yet, it is time to start it!