Previously, we discussed about applying proper SEO techniques to your titles and even the order in which your Post Title and Blog Title should appear. In this post, we shall tackle a related topic that also involves the title of the webpage. And that is the URL of the webpage that we are trying to optimize. SEO URL simply means optimizing your web page’s URL to make it Search Engine friendly.

SEO and URL

For those who do not know it, URL is the acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, just to get that out of the way. It is the web address that is used to identify your web page from the billions of other pages in the Internet.

A URL may be as simple as the web address of my blog:

http://arnoldmartinez.com

Or it can be as complicated as this:

http://unoptimizedurl.com/long-titles/with-a-lot-of-seemingly-random-characters-like-this/hsdb?fgeja21j36hswnswp/canyoutryrememberingthisurl.html

If you are using a blogging platform like WordPress, then your work is cut out for you. Whenever you would make a blog post, WordPress already takes care of creating your URL for your post.

However, that does not necessarily mean that you should just accept what WordPress is assigning to you as your post’s URL.

Optimized SEO URL

For starters, you can edit the structure of your URL to be more SEO friendly.

1.) In your WordPress Dashboard, go to “Settings”
2.) Click on “Permalinks”
3.) Among the different options, choose wither “Day and Name” or “Month and Name”
4.) Or you may also choose “Custom Structure” and type in “%postname%” without the quotes.

The reason for this is for your URL’s to reflect the actual titles of your blog posts. The other options in the Permalink section would just assign numbers to identify the different pages and posts in your blog.

In terms of functionality, there is practically no difference between the different URL structures. All of them assign a unique URL to your blog post or webpage. But in terms of readability and contextual identity, the URL where the title of the post can be easily read and identified has the advantage.

Short URL For Better SEO

It must also be pointed out that it is possible to edit the URL of every blogpost that you make to make it more keyword-friendly. Some SEO experts advise on removing “stop words” in your URL. Stop words are usually articles or short words that do not give any added value to the keyword weight of the URL.. Matt Cutts, himself, said it in one of his interviews. The shorter the URL, the better. You may be better off sticking to 3-5 words in your blog post titles. And manually editing your titles may be the key to this.

Remember that in search engine results, the URL of the webpages are included in the individual results. It is actually the last line colored green in every Google result.

Isn’t it a lot easier to confirm that the results of your Google search are actually what you are searching if you can read the keywords that you are looking for in the webpage’s URL? Or, at least, the URL gives you an idea that the webpage that you would be clicking on is related to the topic that you are researching.

And more importantly, from an SEO standpoint, the keywords that are contained in the URL of your webpage add to the relevance of the webpage to the keyword that you are targeting. Of course, this is from the search engine algorithm’s point of view.

So, the next time you time you think about SEO URL or URL SEO optimization, remember that the structure of the URL has its purposes – both for simplicity and functionality.