Creating your URL
When improving your URL creation process, it’s never a good idea to update existing landing pages. Updating old landing pages with new URLs can take a lot of time and hurt the page’s existing SEO metrics. Therefore, when learning to create better URLs, its best to focus on the future and only apply these lessons to new posts and landing pages.
London SEO specialists explain that every URL creation will involve a combination of market research and the application of various tactics that will improve the SEO-friendliness of any URL. Here are the basic steps to creating a URL that is both SEO-friendly and relevant to your website’s content.
1. Create a Compelling Page Title
In general, the title of your article is already a good page title to start with. The title of your article is relevant to your content and website and there shouldn’t be a reason you need to change it. Page titles should be in line with your brand story and overall digital marketing strategy.
2. URLs Should Not Include Special Characters
When creating your URL, you should not include any special characters, even if they’re in the title of your article or webpage. For instance, if you have an article title like “The best pizza in NYC (and the worst)”, it’s better to remove the “()” to make your URL more searchable.
Any special characters like colons, semicolons, commas, parenthesis, brackets, quotation marks, and more should not be in your URL regardless of if they’re in your webpage title.
3. Remove Numbers from your URL
Having numbers in your URL can be a tricky thing. While numbers themselves don’t harm the URL’s effectiveness when being searched, they limit your ability to update the webpage in the future, which does hurt your website’s SEO.
For example, if you post an article about the “Top 15 Pizzerias in NYC”, you will have to stick to that “15” number unless you want to risk hurting your SEO. For this reason, it’s better to leave out the number and just have a title like “Top Pizzerias in NYC”.
4. Delete Superfluous Words
While the URL you use should be related to your article title or landing page, it does not need to include all the words in your title. Long URLs can be intimidating for first-time users and appear as spam compared to shorter URLs that come off as more professional and easier to read.
Therefore, when writing your URL, it’s best to take out any unnecessary words. For instance, in the title “The Best Pizzerias for Visitors in NYC” you can remove words like the, for, and in. Thus, a better URL will only include the words “Best Pizzerias Visitors NYC”.
5. Simplify your URL to a Keyword or Phrase
Now that you have the most important words from your article or landing page in your URL, you can simplify it even further. In the same logic as above, any chance to shorten your URL will help improve its SEO and likeliness for someone to click on your website. Further, by doing some keyword research through a tool like Ahrefs, you can determine which words or phrases people search when looking at products or services like yours.
For instance, instead of using “Best Pizzerias Visitors NYC” you may discover that “Best Pizza NYC” has more searches and is more SEO friendly.
6. Make it Lowercase
Using all lowercase letters used to be more important when creating a URL. While it isn’t as important anymore with advancements in SEO technology, it is still a best practice that is worth sticking to.
7. Replace Spaces with Hyphens
Another best practice to use is by replacing any spaces in your URL with hyphens. While many website builders like WordPress will do this automatically, it is important to create a URL that looks like the following: “best-pizzas-nyc”.
