June 11th, 2007
How to Write and Name URLs for blogs & websites
URL joke
We all know that google and other search engines find revelant URLs important and it is important to have a certain URL structure for blogs as well as websites. The rather obvious reasons include easier to remember as well as more practical SEO reasons.
URLs for Static Websites
Static (X)HTML websites are easy to create informative, easy to remember and revelant URLs by using the heading of the page as the URL. However if the heading is over 50 characters, I would suggest condensing it. If you need to condense a URL, keep the important SEO friendly key words and also do not use business jargon acronyms as you and some people in your business may know what they mean but others do not and neither do the search engine crawlers.
Example Heading: Bobs Industry Standards Insurance
Wrong URL: http://www.example.com/bobs_is_insurance.html
Correct URL: http://www.example.com/insurance.html
The above examples show that it is easier to remember a short URL than a long one that makes no sense.
URLs for Blogs
With blogs however, it may not be as easy as a lot of blogging software either adds the article into folders of dates or give the article an individual number. WordPress which I personally use does this. By default is makes your post URL like this (using my domain for example): http://germworks.net/blog/?p=123. A popular option which I personally use is using the date folders option which goes like this: http://germworks.net/blog/2007/06/06/sample-post. This is ok for blog posts seeing dates are important.
URLs for Blog/ CMS Websites
However if you are using WordPress as a CMS like for example (Phillipwray Racing - being released soon), it will be a better option to create a custom URL format that will look like: http://germworks.net/blog/sample-post.
Other tips for Writing and Naming URLs
I have also seen in a few occasions were the URL is on purpose different than the Heading for various reasons. One example is in the article “The 80/20 Of Search Engine Marketing - Part 1” and the URL is: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/331/search-engine-marketing-part-1.
Another example is one of my posts about a CSS IE hack. I changed the heading of the post on purpose to include the word Min so it said “Min-width IE Hack” which is a more common search phrase. I however did not change the URL (http://germworks.net/blog/2007/01/31/width-ie-hack/) however, otherwise people will not be able to come back if they have bookmarked/ copied the URL.
Conclusion
While I am not a total expert (who is) and do not claim to be one, if you follow some simple suggestions like I have suggested, not only will your page ranking go up but you will also get more visitors and more people coming back.
EDIT: I have had to close comments due to spammer contunisly targetting this post!
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In Wordpress, you can change the way your post’s url get displayed by modifying the post slug and setting the one you would like to appear else things will get displayed as set in the Options > Permalinks section.
If you ever want to change URL after publishing a post, which I usually do(if a post is really irrelevant or a site I reviewed is down), then use a 301 redirect. It’s easy, you’ll just have to modify your .htaccess file and add a simple line to point to the new post so that visitors having the previous links fall automatically on the new one.
I think I’ll have to discuss this in detail on blog post since many have been getting such problem resulting in hitting 404 wall if care isn’t taken to handle things correctly.
Comment by Hans — July 2nd, 2007 @ 6:01 pm