ALL COUNTRIES:
June 17, 2020 @ 1:00 PM By Aubhav Garg
According to a study by Moz, URL themselves generally don’t have a major impact on a page’s visibility to rank.
Well, even small factors overlooked can affect the overall optimization strategy. Most of the websites have problems with the structure. The URL format, site navigation, and arguably the most important internal linking structure is what grants strength to your website.
You might have witnessed strange characters in URL such as $, & and @. When you are here to please the search engines, then incorporating these characters won’t help you with the optimization efforts. With this type of URL structure, guess what you only have 0.1% chances of getting ranked!
If this is your question –“Does Changing URL structure affect my SEO efforts?”
Then, yes, in this case, it affects your SEO efforts to a major extent.
You need to twist your URL strategy.
URL is a declining ranking factor with Google’s emphasis on other search engine rankings factors. When you create a URL for your website, it doesn’t necessarily mean to be keyword rich. If it makes sense you can but stuffing keywords makes it seem unnatural.
URL that contains 30-45 characters tends to dominate the search listings.
The ideal URL should be able to tell the readers what it is about. The user should be able to grasp that what they will find when they click on it.
Fix your URL structure as no matter how established a website is, it is important to abide by the SEO rules. Make sure to put the 301 redirects for any page you change in .htaccess file.
A URL is read by both humans and the search engine, so it is important to make sense. It doesn’t matter whether you have a plain HTML structure or a CMS blog that runs Word Press. Each page should have a definite purpose in the URL.
Why would you not want to make it accessible to the user and the search engines? Create readable URLs for your website for better optimization and results.
Including hyphens and underscores improves visibility as it makes it easy for the search engine and humans to comprehend it. Avoid using spaces in URL because they translate only 20% within the URL. Make sure to check your URL and ensure that they are not truncating your URL.
This is one of the most neglected elements in SEO success. Internal links use keyword-rich places within your text content to link to other relevant pages on your website. This gives the signal to the search engines what your other pages are about. They help in decreasing the depth and help users find the related content.
Generally, the business online tends to have a complex site navigation structure owing to the preference of Javascript and Flash menus. The spiders have trouble crawling the JavaScript and Flash links.
But why lose on sales when you can just double up with HTML and CSS structure? Proper and easy navigation structure and the images optimized with right Alt tags help the crawlers index your website better.
Avoid having a deep navigation structure as no one has the time to go through many clicks to access what your website is all about. Having a shallow website structure helps in decreasing your bounce rate and improves your site’s rankings.
If you want more footfalls on the website, you need to work on your website’s URL structure. Easy navigation accounts for more traffic and enhanced User experience.
Optimize your URLs by avoiding strange characters, and the keyword stuffing that can hurt your SEO efforts. Focus on creating relevant and readable URL structures optimized for search engines and humans. I recommend you hire an SEO company for better results.
However, you do not need to employ much of your marketing efforts on URL structure because it does not necessarily affect the SEO rankings, but you can surely utilize the above steps for creating a strong URL structure.