Hello, My Name Is URL

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 11 of October , 2007 at 6:56 am

Do you know what an URL is? You should. It stands for Uniform Resource Locator. In simple terms, your URL is your web address, but it’s more than just www.mydomain.com.

An URL can also be the individual pages within your website. For example: www.mydomain.com/this-is-a-new-page. For SEO purposes, short URLs are better than long URLs. In other words, if you have a chance to create an URL that is one or two words rather than ten words then go with the shorter URL. www.mydomain.com/new-page is a lot better than www.mydomain.com/this-is-a-new-page-i-created-just-for-this-purpose, for instance.

Another form that URLs may take is with numbers and special characters. The search engines are getting better at crawling URLs that contain special characters, but they used to not crawl them at all. They’ve realized, however, that people use special characters to track results of their sales campaigns. That is a legitimate purpose, by the way.

I wouldn’t use numbers in most URLs, however. You’re much better off creating a keyword-rich URL. It will be crawled better and it will provide you with better search engine benefits. But there are times when you might dispense with the keyword-rich URL altogether. If you are targeting a special promotion to different market segments and you want to track the results you get for each market segment then you might create your generic web page, which does contain your keyword-rich URL - www.mydomain.com/special-promotion.

Then, you’ll want to take the same page and change the second half of that URL to include your tracking code:

www.mydomain.com/special-promotion?123456, or
www.mydomain.com/special-promotion?123457

Each target market will be sent, using your advertising sources, to the appropriate page for tracking purposes. Each web page will appear exactly the same, but the URL will be different. If you use this strategy, however, you’ll want to make each page containing a tracking code a nofollow page. Otherwise, you’ll be penalized by the search engines for creating duplicate pages. The purpose, after all, is to track your advertising results so you really don’t want the search engines crawling those pages.

There is a lot more that could be said for URLs. But the main point I want you to walk away from with this lesson is to create a short URL whenever possible. Take out the excessive dashes and long names that lead to nowhere.

                      Category: SEO                      

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