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When it comes to optimising your website for search engine performance, there are some things to consider as part of the build process.This time last year, in December 2010, I wrote an article called SEO – The Basics, which introduced the wide-reaching topic of SEO.  Recently I expanded on this post to write about SEO – How to write good Page Titles.  In this post, I am going to explore in more detail another of the points that I wrote about; your website structure and in particular your Page URLs.

What is a Page URL?

URLs are web addresses and appear in the address bar of your web browser

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is the character string that references an Internet resource.  Put simply, it’s the specific web address for a web page and is found in the address bar of your web browser.  The URL for this page is www.blueplanetinternet.co.uk/blog/seo-what-to-consider-when-building-your-website.

How to structure your Page URLs

Search engines will look at the URL of a page when considering what it is about.  If your keywords are included in the page URL, this will help your search engine position for that search term.

Assuming that you’ve already completed the vital step of researching the best keywords for your business, let’s look at how best to write your Page URLs for maximum effect.

If your chosen keyword is, let’s say “plumber east sussex”, you should include this in your Page URL – as with your page Title, the more important the keyword is, the nearer the start of your URL it should appear.  A good Page URL in this case might be “www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber-east-sussex.html“.

Dashes, underscores and suffixes

There has been debate in the past about whether it is better to use dashes (“-”) or underscores (“_”) in Page URLs.  At one point underscores got the vote, whereas more recently dashes were seen to be more effective.  Similarly, a suffix like .html or .php was considered to be less desirable than no suffix at all – so www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber-east-sussex was better than www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber-east-sussex.html.  The truth is that the search engines are very clever, and will strip out these characters in any case.  Don’t get hung up about it.

The right length for Page URLs

As with any Search Engine Optimisation, play by the search engines rules but don’t try and break them.  Go over the top and you’ll undo your hard work.  Don’t pack a ridiculously long URL with your keywords, like this:

www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber-plumbers-plumbing-east-sussex-west-sussex.html

Site structure

If your business has a handful of key areas or services, it would be worth structuring your website to include the keywords for these areas in your Page URLs like this:

www.yourdomainname.co.uk/plumber/repairs-east-sussex
www.yourdomainname.co.uk/heating-engineer/boiler-repairs-east-sussex

You can do this by creating sub-directories within your website structure that contain your keywords.  In the examples above, your sub-directories would be called “plumber” and “heating-engineer”.

A good Content Management System (CMS) will enable you to edit URLs

But I’ve already had my website built and I don’t want a new one

We realise that you might be approaching this issue after your website has been created, but if so, don’t despair – it can still be fixed.  If you have a good Content Management System (CMS) integrated into your website, you can probably change the Page URLs yourself and call them whatever you like.

If your CMS doesn’t allow you to change URLs, or you don’t have a Content Management System at all, you’ll need to ask your website developer to make the changes for you.  Or you can ask us.

How we can help

Blue Planet helps businesses get more from their websites through online marketing and promotion.  If you’re serious about making the internet a crucial part of your marketing and want to see a great return on your investment, give us a call on 01825 760909 or email mark@blueplanetinternet.co.uk for an initial chat about how we can help you.