A few days of 80 degree weather in a row and we just can’t stop our little Bugdroid from her yearly URL cleaning. During this time you can often find her climbing onto one of our desks and sweeping away nonsensical characters that tend to build up on the end of URLs like snowdrifts in the wind during the winter months.
Her cleaning has inspired us to provide you with a few simple tips for cleaning up the URLs on your website. There are more than 5 ways to improve your URL presence, but as long as you are following these 5 tips your URLs have a great chance of performing well.
Best Practices for URLS
1. Create descriptive URLs
A user should be able to get a clear understanding of your page’s content just by looking at the URL. A url that looks like this: http://ds958.domain.cc/tYY872mdght=fht#layerbuild will cause a visitor to your site to pause and consider if it’s safe to click. On the other hand, and URL like: https://rgbinternet.com/blogs/tips-and-faqs/a-bit-about-hashtags presents a clear idea of what you find there.
2. Short URLs
Performing an online search and clicking on your site is simple, but what if you want to recommend your site to a friend or potential customer and all you have is a pen and paper? How would your site’s URL look on a business card? The shorter and clearer the URL, the greater the chance your site’s branding will spread.
3. Keywords within your URL
The internet is nothing if not competitive, and you want to have the best advantage possible to bring traffic to your site. Adding the correct keywords to your URL is a great way to compete for search position.
4. Use subdomains sparingly
Subdomains should only be used when a separate website is required, i.e, if you have an eCommerce site that’s separate from your main website, in this case you would use shop.example.com for the eCommerce domain, and example.com for the primary domain. The key to subdomains is proper interlinking between the subdomain and primary domain.
5. Sweep up those uppercase characters.
Uppercase letters in your URL can cause issues when people are manually typing in your URL. If you do have uppercase letters in your URL create a 301 redirect to a lowercase version of that url, of create a 301 rule to correct incorrect capitalization.
These are just a few ways to improve performance with your URLs. If you have any questions about URL best practices, or would like RGB to look into your URLs feel free to give us a call.