The Link Between URL and SEO

Take a sporting event such as the mile run in a Track and Field Competition. You are running a race with other competitors, hoping to get across the finish line first. It takes a lot of hard work, practicing and sore muscles to become that winner. Think of getting your website listed on the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as a competition such as that track race. As a matter of fact, it is exactly that. You are competing with other web site owners to be listed at the top. The only difference is you are not competing with five others; there are millions of website owners who want to be listed at the top.

While properly using SEO techniques, you must also take your URL into consideration. "A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it" (Wikipedia.org). Containing two parts-a domain name and a file name-it is important to remember that the URL is an important link with your SEO techniques.

1. Keywords are a must. Make sure your URL gives your audience an idea of what you website is offering. If you are writing free-lance articles, for example, one of your key phrases should be the title of your article, or parts of the title. With each article, you get a unique URL. There are some sites that shorten the URL for you to make it easier to post a link. An excellent example is Twitter, where you can send short messages to your followers. This is an excellent place where online business owners can post links to their websites. Twitter encodes the URL to make it shorter so you can type a longer message. Make sure you leave something in your tweet that describes your website.

2. Avoid duplicate WebPages. You may be one of those free-lance writers who write for several different sites. While some of your articles may be exclusive to a particular site, the others are nonexclusive where you can post them on other sites. You get a unique URL for each article you have posted online. However, if each of the articles are a duplicate of the other, only one of them will be listed on the seIf you want more exposure to the other articles, you should consider adding some duplicate content to each of the other articles.

3. Use a hyphen rather than an underscore in your URL. For example, you may have a website for pets and you want to include the words "cat and dogs" in your URL. If your URL is this http://www.cats_and_dogs.com (fictional), for somebody to find this through the search engines, they have to type in "cats_and_dogs" in the search box. However, if your URL is http://www.cats-and-dogs (fictional), they web searcher does not need to include the hyphens.

4. Keep it simple. A shorter URL is more effective than those that have an endless amount of extensions. If you already use Twitter.com to post links to your website, you already know that you do not have much room to play with since your tweets can be no longer that 140 characters. People tend to remember the shorter URLs better than the longer ones.

Even though you are applying all the SEO techniques that you are learning to your website, if you have a weak URL, you will be doomed to failure. By applying the above tips, you are giving your website the potential to be at the top of the Search Engine Results Page every time an individual conducts a search query.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator