Enjoy Better Seo With The New Blogging Url Structure

1. Users can still tell what the content is about with the second, restructured URL, but it contains fewer folders. And if you really want to get specific in terms of the number of folders to use, stick with one or two. This makes your URL way more eye appealing, and it's easier for search engines to decipher the meaning. Target 1-2 keywords.
2. Headings are very important when working on SEO for blogs because they represent the main topics that you are covering in your post. It aids also in your blog's readability because it brings a structure to your article. You can make use also of subheadings and try to insert your keywords in these headings and subheadings.

And if you're moving a page to a different location—and hence, a different URL—set up a redirect to the new location. The beauty of the 301 redirect is that it preserves so-called 'link juice'—the SEO equity a page has built up over time—so the new page can enjoy the same rank the old page had. Or, hopefully, even better. Blog subdomain conflict Example: The Travel sector. As with all sites, putting a blog or a news page on a subdomain can cause major cannibalisation issues with the rest of the site. The news pages have their own internal linking structure, separate tags and menu bars. These major category terms are also likely to appear in the main bulk of the. Oct 13, 2020 Use an SEO-friendly URL structure Google prefers simple URLs. Make sure your team keeps these things in mind whenever they create a new page or blog post: Use lowercase words with alphanumeric characters.

On the modern web, having a website is only half the battle.

The other half? Getting people to your website. And in many ways, that's a much harder battle to wage.

After all, nobody's stopping you from building a website. With tools like Webflow, it's never been easier to get yourself online in a big, bold, dynamic, and responsive way.

But when it comes to getting people to check out your site, you've got some competition. A lot of competition. Depending on the topics you create content about, you could be entering a veritable content war — a war with thousands of other opponents.

To survive — and ideally, win — that war, you'll need to think about how to optimize your website for search engines (i.e., how to do SEO).

But the first, and most important thing to remember is that you should never optimize around search engine algorithms — because algorithms are constantly evolving.

You should optimize your website for humans who use search engines.

After all, search engines exist for humans. They've been optimized by some of the world's top engineers to serve human beings the most relevant, helpful content they can find on any given topic. Plus, search engines take sharing statistics and external links into account when ranking pages, so above all else, your content should:

1. Clearly and helpful answer people's questions
2. Be 'shareable' — i.e., so helpful and/or entertaining that people can't help but share it
   

In short, there's one simple key to SEO: make your content amazing.

That said, there are many things you can do in Webflow to optimize for search that also help improve the clarity, helpfulness, and shareability of your content, so you can optimize for search and for humans at the same time.

Let's dig into those.

1. Design responsively

This one's easy, because Webflow was built for responsive design.

But it's important not to overlook the importance of this. Ensuring your website's responsive does two key things for your SEO:

1. It gets you the all-important 'mobile-friendly' tag in search
2. It helps provide a better experience for everyone by making it easier to give everyone the same content and functionality across every device
   

And because you have an easy way to preview your site on mobile devices right inside Webflow, you'll always have mobile in mind when crafting both your design and content.

2. Research keywords and write 'SERP-in' content

When you're trying to rank highly in search, you have to think in specific terms. And by 'specific terms,' I literally mean 'specific terms.'

So, before you start writing, do some keyword research to find out what terms people actually search for that are relevant to your business.

Now, the term 'keyword research' might sound a little imposing—or expensive (because it can be).

But there are some very easy ways to do some light keyword research that can be very fruitful in generating topics for you to write about. Here's a couple:

Use Google's search suggestions

The easiest way to get ideas for 'SERP-in' content is to head to google.com and start typing.

Let's say you're writing a web design blog and want to start creating content about 'responsive web design.'

I head to Google and type that term, and here's what I see:

And boom! In approximately 0.45 seconds, I've got 3 broad topics (templates, examples, and tutorials) I can turn into at least 3 blog posts or pages—and with a little effort, far, far more.

Especially if I add a step.

Use Google Trends

Now, I'll head over to Google Trends and enter the same terms Google automatically suggested to me. With all that entered, I get the following information.

So. Much. Information.

At the top I see 'Interest over time,' which tells me a lot about this topic across the historical dimension, but also offers a gauge of the relative popularity of all these terms.

That can help me make decisions about what content to prioritize. The graph also gives me a sense of how difficult it might be to rank for these terms, if only in a very abstract way. For example, the general term 'responsive web design' (blue line) is by far the most popular, and will thus be hardest to rank for.

I can also see interest in the term by region, which immediately tells me that this topic is hot in southern Asia. Very handy if I want to target readers in that area.

Finally, and most usefully for content generation, I see the 'Related searches' section. Hello, more content ideas!

Use Google AdWords' Keyword Planner

Even if you're not planning on running any search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns, Google's Keyword Planner gives you incredibly useful information like:

1. Average monthly search volume per keyword
2. Average cost per click (CPC) for keywords
3. Level of competition per keyword

All super useful for prioritizing terms to write content for.

For example, if I see that a term has really high search volume and high cost per click, I know there's going to be a lot of competition to rank for that term. And that means that I might have more luck targeting a more specific search term or phrase with less competition.

Note: many SEO tools will give you a stat like 'domain authority,' which is a rough estimate of how much of an authority Google grants your site on its core topics. The higher your site's authority is, the better a chance you'll have to rank for high-competition terms, so keep that in mind as you're prioritizing topics.

Now start writing that SERP-in content!

Ok, so now you know what to write about. The next step is to actually get down to the writing (or filming, or podcasting, or whatever).

All that research you've just done now becomes even more valuable—because now you can ensure that your content focuses on that topic with laser precision. And that informs more than just the topic and discussion points.

It also gives me words and phrases that have to appear in the:

1. Meta title
2. Meta description
3. URL
4. H1
5. H2s

And, if you're cross-linking between pages on your site (as you totally should be), it gives you terms that you should use in linking to this new content.

So if I'm writing a page focused on 'responsive web design examples,' I can start writing all those page elements before I even have the whole post or page outlined. Like so:

1. Meta title: 10 beautiful responsive web design examples
2. Meta description: Check out 10 examples of responsive web design in action, and learn how to design your own responsive website.
3. URL: mysite.com/responsive-web-design-examples
4. H1: 10 beautiful responsive web design examples
5. H2s: Responsive web design example #1 (and #2 and #3, etc.)
6. And, I know I should embed links to this page in the phrase 'responsive web design examples'

And now I've got the structure for a highly SEO-optimized page in place. Easy.

Play the 'what is it?' game

I once worked very closely with a brilliant SEO by the name of Nick Musica. He taught me a lot about search (much of which I forgot—sorry, Nick), but among those things that stuck, the 'what is it?' game ranks highly.

Basically, we 'good' writers are very used to omitting the subjects of our sentences after an initial reference. Because usually, what we're talking about is clear to anyone who's reading our content continuously.

But many people don't read content on the web continuously. Instead, they scan—which means they won't always know what I'm talking about when I say 'it.'

So after you write up your content, hit Ctrl+F and search the word 'it.' Then replace instances of 'it' with the appropriate noun. Then do that again with generic forms of your focus term. So, if I'm writing about 'responsive websites,' I'd Ctrl+F variants like 'site,' 'website,' etc.

3. Put your most important pages up top

To Google, your most important pages—the pages you want to do really well in search—are your top-level pages.

What do I mean by 'top-level pages'? I mean the pages on your root domain level. Examples from webflow.com include:

1. webflow.com/cms
2. webflow.com/designer
3. webflow.com/pricing

Because we thought these pages were important enough to put at the very top of our site, Google thinks they're pretty important too. It wants to find the best and most helpful content there, so it's on us to put that content there.

So, if there are pages you really want to rank well in search, make sure they're not buried in a folder somewhere. Pages buried in folders can rank well in search, but they'll do best for highly specific questions like 'how to build a slider in Webflow.'

For more general queries—like 'website builder,' for example—you'll want a top-level page to compete with all the other content out there that's gunning for that same term.

4. Subdomain responsibly

Hate to break it to you, but as far as Google's concerned, your subdomain is a completely different website than your root domain.

This has benefits and drawbacks, so this doesn't mean you shouldn't use subdomains. It just means that, when you do so, you should do it consciously. Know that this subdomain, no matter how popular, isn't going to feed directly into the your core site's SEO. Know that, if it does help, it will do so via the links that take people from the subdomain to your core site.

So that subdomain better be useful, entertaining, and shareable—and actually have links to your core site sprinkled throughout.

Note that one of the ramifications of this is that you should put your blog on your root domain, not a subdomain, if you want it to benefit your main website.

Putting your blog on a subdomain is a big, and extremely common, mistake.

5. Optimize your URLs, meta titles, and descriptions

As you probably picked up from tip #2 above—especially the 'Now start writing…' bit—it's vital that you have your target keywords/keyphrases in mind when you write your content.

That way, search engine optimization becomes a simple matter of including your target keyword or phrase in all the right places (title, description, URL, H1s and 2s, etc.) and staying on topic.

Doing it the other way around—i.e., optimizing after you write—is actually harder, and can lead to mismatches between the target keyword and what your page is actually about. That's not to say you can't do after-the-fact optimizations, but it's not ideal.

Note that Webflow gives you complete control over your page's URLs, titles, and descriptions for both static and dynamic content. And with dynamic content, you can actually automate the definition of your titles and descriptions using fields in your Collections.

Pro tip: Turn Webflow CMS into your style guide

Create fields for your dynamic Collections that will directly translate to your meta title and description, then set character limits for each based on the current 'ideal' lengths of 55 characters for title (subtracting your site title, if you use it in your title tag) and 155 for description.

6. 301 redirect for the win

The beauty of the web is that it's never fixed, never static. You can constantly reinvent your website's design, content, and information architecture to create the best experience for your users.

But there's a drawback to that: when you change site structure, you often end up deleting pages, or simply changing where they 'live' on the site.

Thankfully, there's the 301 redirect for that.

Whenever you delete a page, make sure to redirect the old URL to a new one with similar (and hopefully, more useful) content. And if you're moving a page to a different location—and hence, a different URL—set up a redirect to the new location.

The beauty of the 301 redirect is that it preserves so-called 'link juice'—the SEO equity a page has built up over time—so the new page can enjoy the same rank the old page had. Or, hopefully, even better.

Build completely custom, production-ready websites — or ultra-high-fidelity prototypes — without writing a line of code. Only with Webflow.

7. Make it canonical

With a little custom code inside the tag, you can use a handy HTML tag called 'rel=canonical' to ensure that Google knows what URL represents the definitive version of a particular page or bit of content.

This comes in handy if, for instance, you have an ecommerce website that generates links based on variant versions of a single product.

For example, you might sell a single T-shirt that comes in a range of sizes and colors. Depending on your ecommerce platform, each of those many variations might generate a unique URL—but they all bring people to the same page.

To Google, that can look like one of the deadliest of SEO sins: duplicate content. Because each of those URLs points to the same content, it looks like you just published 10 versions of the exact same content in an attempt to game the rankings.

But if you add rel=canonical to the most definitive version of that URL (i.e., the one you want to rank for), you shouldn't have any duplicate content problems.

Here's what a canonical link tag looks like in code:

And here it is in action on our very own blog:

We also added a 'canonical link' field to our Blog Post Collection Template using the Link field type and a dynamic embed:

Just note that if you use this method, you'll always need to add a link to the canonical field in your Collection. Otherwise, the canonical code snippet will show up empty in your source code.

Pro tip: republishing content and rel=canonical

If you're in the habit of republishing your articles on Medium, LinkedIn, or any other blogging platform, be sure to add rel=canonical to your original post and the syndicated version. If you're syndicating your content on Medium, make sure you use its import tool to ensure it adds the canonical link automatically.

8. Work that (auto-generated) sitemap

When you set up custom domain hosting with us, Webflow automatically creates one key element of your website SEO for you: an XML sitemap.

The great thing about an XML sitemap is that it gives Google's spiders the lay of the land, helping to guide how and where they crawl your site.

You can do all kinds of stuff with your sitemap, but its most important function is to let Google know about pages that may not be well-connected internally or linked to externally. You can also provide metadata such as when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and the importance of the page relative to other URLs in the site.

Note that priority isn't particularly important for rankings—as usual, Google decides what to rank where—and that it's relative only to other pages on your site. But no-indexing is super handy.

Beyond that, the important thing is that you have a sitemap. Thankfully, Webflow's got you covered there.

9. Build a helpful 404 page

Creating a 404 page in Webflow couldn't be easier. Just create a page called 404, give it a URL ending in /404, and design it however you'd like.

Boom.

But you're not done there. Because a 404 page offers some unique opportunities to ease the pain of having hit a nonexistent page.

When a person runs into your 404 page, they're quite possibly a bit annoyed. After all, they probably clicked this link because you told them to (in one way or another) and they wanted to either learn or do something there.

And while many sites try to mitigate that annoyance with a bit of humor—a fact we in the industry love and obsess over, a bit—I'd suggest you either steer clear, or keep it really light.

Just remember the last time you tried to tell an angry person a joke.

Instead:

1. Let people know something went wrong—and be clear about it. A giant 404 centered in the screen is crystal clear to savvy web users, but most people have no idea what an error code is, let alone the specific code, 404.
2. Offer an out. You can do this many ways, but some of the most helpful are: a search box (so they can search for what they came for in the first place), links to top pages or areas of your site (so they can find something related), or a link to your homepage (so they can at least reorient themselves.
3. Provide a feedback mechanism. If people are hitting your 404 page, there could be something wrong that you don't even know about. A simple CTA of 'let us know' with an embedded mailto link or pre-filled tweet can let people tell you something's wrong.

10. Alt tag all the things

Alt tags are probably the great forgotten but incredibly useful HTML element. Forgotten because they're often hidden away in CMS interfaces, but incredibly useful because:

1. They make images—a form of content that those with no or poor vision can't normally enjoy—more accessible (because screen readers can read them)
2. They give you another place to work in keywords

So be sure to add descriptive alt tags to your images. That is, make sure they describe the content of the image in a way that lets people with poor or no vision 'see' them.

Enjoy Better Seo With The New Blogging Url Structure Enables

Include keywords when relevant. Once upon a time, people took advantage of alt tags to list 50 keywords in a place that most people would never see. Google quickly got wise to that, and will penalize you for keyword-stuffing your images.

But if you can mention a keyword in a contextually relevant and non-spammy way, by all means, do it. This will not only help Google's standard text-search engine identify your page's topic, but also help people using image search stumble across your site.

Also, you should give your images relevant, descriptive filenames. Do what I say, not what I do.

Note: Images that are purely decorative — i.e., that don't add any information to the page — should not be given an alt tag. Thankfully, Webflow defaults to empty alt tags, so if your page includes a decorative image, simply don't add an alt tag to it.

11. Fire up your robots(.txt)

Enjoy Better Seo With The New Blogging Url Structure Builder

Webflow also gives you easy access to your site's robots.txt file via the SEO tab of your sites' settings. The robots.txt file, as you might infer from its name, lets you provide instructions to the robots that crawl your sites, including Google's.

The key functionality you'll probably want here is the ability to no-index pages, which is a way of telling Google to not crawl a particular area or page of your website.

This can be very handy if you're in progress on a page and don't want the world to find it. (Our password protection feature, available in the Pro plan or higher, is also great for this.)

It also leads me naturally to our next tip:

12. Disable indexing of your webflow.io subdomain

One of Webflow's handier features is that you automatically get a staging domain for every website you make: a subdomain version of your site on webflow.io.

It's an exact copy of your website, on a different URL, that you don't actually direct people to. And that first clause—'an exact copy of your website'—is the wonderful and awful thing about it.

Wonderful, because it lets you play. You can try new design patterns and approaches, publish that wacky blog post you're not totally sure about—whatever.

Awful, because as far as Google's concerned, having the same content on two different URLs is a very. Bad. Thing.

(Granted, with the increasing popularity of republishing of web content on various domains like Medium and LinkedIn, Google's getting better at finding the source of truth for content.)

Thankfully, you can easily avoid the whole duplicate problem with one click. Just toggle 'disable subdomain indexing' and you'll be good to go.

13. Set up your Google Analytics!

Okay, so Google Analytics isn't going to directly improve your on-page SEO. But it will give you so much information about your users, traffic sources, and content performance that not having it set up is like shooting in the dark.

14. Driving organic visitors to your blog posts

As mentioned earlier, algorithms are constantly changing. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing blog posts to game search algorithms. Today, SEO is moving towards a more personalized experience. That means that while it's still important to do keyword research and have proper on-page SEO, it's even more important to understand the fundamentals of what Google actually cares about. Simply put, Google really only cares about 3 things:

1. Relevance

Google will crawl your blog post and ask, 'Is this content relevant to the keyword search?' This is essentially the second point that we discussed earlier about SERP-in content. So, if you're talking about 'web design trends,' make sure that Google can easily find this keyword in your content. How do you do that? By including your target keyword in your slug, headline, and throughout the rest of your text. See tip 5 above for more on this.

2. Authority

Google wants to show users content from reputable publishers. Moz SEO, a popular SEO resource, came up with a way to calculate the authority of a website through what they call 'domain authority' (DA). In most — but not all — cases, you'll see that websites with a higher DA rank higher in search results.

A website's DA is measured on a scale from 0 to 100 and increases based on its:

1. Popularity
2. Engagement
3. The number of other websites linking to it
   

All of which means that you should focus, first and foremost, on creating a community and sense of brand around your content. The more people that share your content, the more authority your website will gain.

3. Stickiness

The third thing Google actually cares about is how long people are staying on your post. In other words, how sticky is your content? Does it make the reader stop, thoroughly read, and engage with the content? Google wants to show its users the best content possible. So, if it can tell that people had a good experience reading your content, it will want to show it to more people.

Overall, if you focus on creating great content that actually serves your readers, visitors will come. Google just wants to give people a good user experience, so focus on the 3 points above, produce great content consistently, and over time, you'll see organic growth.

One last, small tip: make sure your website loads fast. If you're using Webflow Hosting, you should be good to go — as long as you aren't using massive images throughout your site. But if you're using third-party hosting, make sure your web pages load in 3 seconds or less. This all ties back to user experience.

SEO is all about knowing your audience

After all, the key to publishing the right content—and thus optimizing your site for search—is knowing what your users want. It's just like they used to say on GI Joe:

Knowing is half the battle.

And now that you know, you can head into the content battle, well armed and ready to win.

URLs for SEO are an important, though often overlooked, element of optimization that can benefit your website's rankings. Typically, when best practices for SEO are discussed, the focus is on using the most important keywords throughout your website in places like meta descriptions, title tags, the alt text of images and page copy. Given the fact that more than 3.5 billion Google searches are performed each day, visibility in search engines is critical to the success of a website and anything that can give your web pages an edge to help it top the rankings should be done.

You can get one over on your competitors by creating a strong URL structure that can help set your site up for SEO success in Google, as explained in the Google Search Console Content Guidelines.

Competition to rank as high as possible in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) is higher than ever before as digital marketing teams are heavily investing in SEO. Taking your site optimization to the next level can help you stand out from the crowd and rank higher than the competition.

To make a start, follow these steps to optimize your URLs for SEO – appealing to search engines like Google and Bing, as well as search engine users.

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Match URLs to page titles

Creating consistency between what your URL reads and your page title can boost your rankings in search engines. One way to do that is to match your URL structure to your page title.

Let's say your page title is ‘Build a Memorable Brand Experience'. If a user performs a Google search and clicks through to your site, the expectation is that the URL for that page matches the page title – and the page content matches both.

This practice helps search engines index your site, but it also builds trust and authority with your audience. Here's what we mean in action.

Page title: Build a Memorable Brand Experience

Your SEO-friendly URL could be: https://www.domain.com/build-memorable-brand-experience

Remove unnecessary words

Your URLs should appeal to two audiences: Google and its users. If the topic of your page isn't quickly understood by glancing at the URL, it's not optimized for SEO. Words that don't add meaning are considered extra and can be removed. On their knowledge base, website optimization company, Yoast, has compiled a list of stop words that are the most common words in the English language. The list includes words like 'and' and 'the.'

Enjoy Better Seo With The New Blogging Url Structure Examples

An example of a URL containing stop words would be:
https://www.domain.com/how-to-optimize-url-structure-for-seo

The same URL optimized for SEO by removing stop words would be: https://www.domain.com/optimize-url-structure-seo

Avoid punctuation

Like stop words, elements of punctuation can be considered non-necessary characters. But they deserve to be explained in their own section. With the rise of content marketing practices and companies heavily investing in the development of helpful resources to answer commons questions, your page title might be a question. Or it may include commas, parentheses, quotation marks, etc.

While punctuation is completely fine in SEO elements like title tags and meta descriptions, don't include them in your URLs. They will only create confusion for search engines and distractions for users, which will negatively impact your search engine rankings.

Web development and design blog, Perishable Press, has a great list of safe vs. unsafe characters to reference.

Utilize hyphens

Break up descriptive words within your URL to improve readability for users and search engines. A recurring debate in the SEO community has been hyphens (these-are-hyphens) vs. underscores (there_are_underscores) and which format Google prefers. Interestingly enough, Google does not treat hyphens and underscores the same when indexing URLs. Hyphens are considered word separators that improve URL readability while underscores are treated as word joiners.

Google would read https://www.domain.com/optimize-url-structure-seo as ‘optimize url structure seo'.

But it would read https://www.domain.com/optimize_url_structure_seo as ‘optimizeurlstructureseo'.

As you can see, Google's translation of your URL with hyphens is easier to read than the jumbled one with underscores.

Enjoy Better Seo With The New Blogging Url Structure Checker

Cut out dynamic parameters

A dynamic URL is a 'URL that results from the search of a database-driven website or the URL of a website that runs a script.' They often contain characters like ?, &, %, +, =, $, cgi-bin, .cgi and are common on e-commerce sites.

Whenever possible, avoid URLs with dynamic parameters as search engines prefer static, SEO-friendly URLs with a logical structure and descriptive keywords. If your content management system automatically creates URLs with dynamic parameters, a workaround to create URLs for SEO is to use a custom link shortening tool like Rebrandly to have more control over the parameters and unique keywords included in your URL.

For example, with a custom link shortening tool, you can transform https://www.domain/xyzproduct/i?HAPL=u#abc43567qw into nike.sneakers/running

Avoid subfolders

Your URLs should be as straightforward and as short as possible. URLs often contain many subfolders and this structure can make it difficult for search engines to crawl your site. To create SEO-friendly URLs, keep them clean by limiting the use of subfolders.

A URL with subfolders could be:
https://www.domain.com/2017/11/09/where-to-buy-nike-running-sneakers

While a URL for SEO would have subfolders removed like this:
https://www.domain.com/where-to-buy-nike-running-sneakers

Limit redirects

Keeping URL redirects to a minimum will put you in a favorable light with search engines. For users, redirects slow down their experience with your site and negatively impact usability. That information is shared with search engines and included in the algorithm used to rank your site.

For search engines, the redirects might not be followed correctly (or at all). That means those ranking signals might not be counted.

Avoid the risk and limit redirects when possible and, if completely necessary, use a 301 redirect for a permanent redirect, which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page.

Use a descriptive domain

Domains are made up of three parts:

• Top-level domain (TLD)
• Domain name
• Optional subdomain

Using a descriptive domain that's relevant to your business and incorporates your most important keywords will improve readability for users.

According to Moz, 'Because of search engine's growing reliance on accessibility and usability as a ranking factor, the easier a domain, or URL, is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines.'

So, a rule of thumb when creating URLs for SEO would be to use a descriptive, memorable domain that's easily read by users and search engines alike.

Shorter is better

A key element of an optimized URL is readability. The goal is to structure a URL in a way that can be easily indexed by search engines and, by default, improve search engine rankings. Long-winded, complex URLs should be avoided.

Instead, develop a URL structure for your website that follows a shorter is better philosophy.

Avoid URLs like this:
https://www.domain.com/mary-poppins-song/super-cala-fragilistic-expialidocious-even-though-the-sound-of-it-is-something-quite-atrocious

Instead, rewrite the above link into an SEO-friendly URL like this:
mary.poppins/song

Use lowercase letters and standard characters

SEO-friendly URLs support Google's guidelines for readability. That's why creating URLs that use lowercase letters and standard characters is a best practice for improving search engine rankings.

Capitalized letters mixed with lowercase letters can make a URL messy. This structure also confuses search engines and users, so avoid them at all costs.

Common non-standard characters in URLs are ones we see in dynamic URLs like %, &, #, @. Some content management systems will also add non-standard characters to document files like PDFs, so be sure to check the structure before sharing your links.

Avoid URLs like this:
https://www.domain.com/Best%-Practices&-SEO%-Friendly-URL-Structure?

Instead, rewrite the above URL like this:
https://www.domain.com/best-practices-seo-friendly-url-structure

Buy short domains which feature keywords

Domains matter when it comes to SEO, though it isn't as important as it used to be so don't go ditching your domain. This tip worth keeping in mind for future websites you may set up.

Domains that are short and feature an important keyword to your business will rank better. People will often link to your website by hyperlinking its name – if you have a keyword in your domain name, this will help you rank for it.

Another SEO factor that Google will look at when competitors are neck and neck is brand queries. If your website's name is a commonly searched keywords, this will benefit your position.

Using custom URLs for SEO

It's not always possible to follow all of these best practices with normal links. Sometimes URL structure can be out of your control, whether its because you had no say in picking the domain name in the first place or you don't have control over your website's subfolders. But luckily, branded links match all of the criteria for an SEO-friendly URL structure.

Even if you have a lengthy link loaded down with UTM parameters, by creating a custom short link it's possible to get the benefit of having these parameters to track your visitors, as well as an easy to read, SEO-optimized link that will please Google and users who see it.

Branded short links include a custom domain and a custom slash tag. So instead of having an unintelligible string of characters like short.ly/X7dl8F, you can create meaningful links like Giannis.Pizza/Menu. The slash tag is where you include your keyword, and if you want to optimize your page for secondary keywords, you can create extra branded links with your secondary keywords in the slash tag to share across your marketing networks too.

Branded links are memorable and because they give readers an indication of the content you're sharing, search engines like them and so do internet browsers – branded links can increase CTRs by up to 39%.

Implementing the best URL structure for SEO can make an impact on your site's visibility in search engines and can help you climb up the ranks of SERPs ahead of your competitors. Following the best practices outlined here can also positively impact conversion rates by appealing to users with URLs that are simple, easy to read, memorable and trustworthy.

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Further Reading:

This Article is About:

• URLs for SEO
• URL structure for search engines
• SEO-friendly URLs
• URL optimization
• Branded links for SEO

Photo in main image by Craig Whitehead via Unsplash