Writing Good URL Names

For some time now I’ve been meaning to write an article on how to properly write a page name URL. What has spurred me on in relation to this subject has been some more recent SEO clients who want to get better rankings however to achieve these better rankings the first port of call is improving the onsite SEO issues that already exist on their sites – specifically the way in which their page URLs have been written.

I’m a strong believer that any website, in order to achieve a good ranking, especially where there is strong competition, should always build their site on strong foundations – as you would a house. This means doing and developing various coding and usability issues that are found on a site.

As many will already know the type and location of a domain name (such as your hosting IP address as well as your domain TLD) all play a role in giving your website the potential to rank well for certain keywords or phrases within particular regional, national and worldwide searches.

Taking this idea of the domain name one step further, the pages we create for a website and the names that we give to this pages can also play an important role in the onsite SEO development of your site.

Here are my key points for writing the perfect web page URL.

When writing a URL always use lower case letters

Not only does lower case look better due to your root domain name being in lowercase, but some computer operating systems cannot interpret uppercase letters hence your potentially stopping users (although a very, very minimal number) from viewing the pages of your website.

Never use spaces to separate words within your URLs

This is an issue I see consistently where pages have been generated and saved using an auto-generated website builder. The issue with this is that URLs have to be one long string of characters; spaces cannot be interpreted. To resolve this whenever a space is used, the space is automatically substituted for an alternative – usually %20 – hence a web page address of ‘my site.html’ would result in it being named and viewed as ‘my%20site.html’. Needless to say this doesn’t look very neat or professional and ultimately generates unwanted code.

Don’t use underscores to separate words within your URLs

The slightly lesser evil of using spaces in your website page names is to use an underscore. Although using underscores is quite good – such as ‘my_site.html’ and allows you to identify and separate words in your web page names, there is a better option both from a visual and SEO point of view (see below).

Always separate individual words using dashes

The dash is the cleanest method for writing a web page name that contains multiple words. By separating each word with a dash – such as ‘my-site.html’ we identify to the search engines that two or more specific words are being used. Not only does this look very clean and professional (over using either spaces or underscores) but is has also been recognised that dashes add slightly more SEO value and strength to your pages. Also note that the uses of dashes (instead of underscores and spaces) can also be applied for folders as well the specific web page files.

Page URLs should always be relational

One of the biggest problems, especially with websites that run some form of shopping cart, is that specific pages within the site are given meaningless URLs, often combining a variety of characters. SEO is becoming a key consideration both with web designers but also with people that develop software that relies on generating URLs automatically. By including the name of the product or specific keywords that relate to the content of the page, combined with the uses of dashes, you give each specific page the best possibly SEO chance. The easiest example to see this in action is the name given to this page that you are reading right now – writing-good-url-names.php – it really doesn’t get much better or more concise than that!

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