Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

A URL is an address of a resource on the World Wide Web (hence WWW or Web). This address will refer you to a particular webpage on the Web and hence allow you to access it through a web browser. 

A typical URL would be: http://www.alertemarketing.com/seo

Impact of URLs for SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about webpages and the content found on the Web. Webpages are indexed on search engines such as Google and their unique reference is the URL. If you make a minor modification to the URL, the search engines will treat the new URL as a completely different page. A modification could be when changing one character in the URL or even changing a parameter at the end of the URL (e.g. &s=1).

To keep it simple, search engines 'assign' a particular score to a webpage. This score is based on the relevancy of the contents on the page and the score passed from all links pointing back to this specific webpage. Relevancy is based on what the search engine thinks are the best pages to return for the user search query. This means that changing the URL would cause some of the score assigned to the old URL to be lost to the new URL. Search engines will not automatically pass the score from the old URL to the new URL without creating a mechanism that instructs search engines the change.

Some Best Practices

When creating URLs, you must carefully plan the URLs for your site. A good website sitemap will also help in creating a good site structure and URLs. The words that follow the domain name in a typical URL are normally the page name. Creating a URL that is easily recognised will help both users and search engines. For instance, with the URL http://www.alertemarketing.com/seo-packages, without visiting the page one can guess what the contents of the page are. In this case 'seo-packages' is the page name. Most of all, using a '-' (dash) to separate the words in the page name creates a clean separator where users and search engines can easily identify every different word within the page name. One can also use '_' (underscore) to use it as a separator; however using dash is preferred.

If you can do without changing your URLs then do not change them. Of course, this doesn't apply when a site is under development or it is a new site and you just recognised a typo in your new page! However, if you have a webpage and need to update the contents of the webpage, use the same webpage. This way the URL of the page will be the same and you will not be creating new URLs for the same webpage.

Another best practice when changing URLs is to create 301-redirects from the old URL to the new URL. This will direct the users from the old URL to the newer URL. This type of redirection will also tell search engines to transfer the SEO score to the new webpage.

Content Management System (CMS)

All the above is not possible without an SEO friendly CMS. A CMS will allow the owner of the website to update the content on the website through a web interface. The CMS hence provides editing capability to the webpage of that website. No shortcuts must be taken when choosing a CMS for your website. Complication and issues arise when a CMS is not SEO friendly. The most worrying fact is that when a CMS is not SEO friendly it is most probably not user friendly.

Having a CMS creating long URLs, or even worse, with a lot of characters at the end, is not SEO friendly. A CMS may also provide additional tags in the code that tells search engine the original version of the webpage. This will better guide search engines and will reduce the possibility of losing SEO benefit.

URLs are a vital component in SEO. It is advised to seek SEO Consultancy when making huge modifications to a website. Changing a CMS or migrating to a new domain could drastically affect the SEO for that website.

Conrad Bugeja is a Search Optimisation Consultant and Pay-Per-Click Consultant at Alert eBusiness Internet Marketing Division - www.alertemarketing.com