URL structure

Marketing
1

Hi,

How important for SEO is the URL structure?

My mum has a site at the mo with the structure like

http://www.princessgownsonline.co.uk/index.php?cPath=3&osCsid=f8422bf737972a8cb8fb81f295eae2bb

If I could change this into something like http://www.princessgownsonline.co.uk/prom-dresses

How much would this improve SEO?

I know that’s not the main thing I need to do but am building another site for her…

Just seeing if it’s worth doing…

Thanks

2

dear all url must be SEO friendly means static url help you in SEO

3

well i think URl structure helps u to get more traffic as the accurate path defined may make youe site user friendl.And your URL or the path of the URL dtermined in a proper way can make easy for spiders to crawl the particualr page.

4

As far as I know search engines don’t really care about you strcture your URL’s that much.
However, the URL’s like /prom-dresses are much nicer for humans to read because they are desciptive.
On a page with the URL /prom-dresses I can be quite confident the content will be about prom dresses, where as a page with an URL like /index.php?bla=blah&blabla=blahblah could be about virtually anything.

If you’re looking for a way on how to implement these nicer URL’s you could look in to URL rewriting. Based on your webserver you could either look at mod_rewrite (Apache) or ISAPI Rewrite (IIS).

5

I agree completely. SEO friendly URLs help the users more than the search engines but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t implement them. (:

6

If you’re starting a new site then sure, aim to have keywords in the URLs rather than just weird query strings.

It provides some small SEO benefit, and every little bit helps.

7

that’s where search engine bots crawl to index your whole site… properly structured URL helps bot easily crawl your site…

8

Search engines prefers static urls over dynamic urls…so it definitely benefits you…

9

Using human-friendly URLs has several benefits:

  • When they appear in a SERP, it’s obvious to people that the page is relevant if their search terms are contained in the URL
  • It’s easier for people to type the URL in from scratch or to retype it and find it in the ‘history’
  • It’s easier for you to manage your site if it’s obvious what each link is
  • Search engines prefer static URLs for pages that are essentially static, and dynamic URLs (ie, those with ?query=parameter in) for dynamic pages that are generated on the fly.

Search engines may give an infinitessimal boost to pages if search terms appear in the URL, but the other benefits above are more important. What really matters, for static pages, is that you have one consistent canonical URL. If you use queries, make sure that all possible permutations and extraneous parameters are re-written to give the preferred form.

10

as far as i know google dont bother much about url link structure but it is definitively helps customer experience and increase conversion

11

When we switched over to seo friendly urls are traffic went up! It was totally worth the update.

12

Your traffic went up, but did you position in the SERP improve which would merit the increase in traffic? Trying to see if there was another factor involved.

13

The URL structure has relatively nothing to do with increased traffic - it wouldn’t. If the site is more user friendly you may have increased user retention but won’t generate additional traffic.

Search engine spiders can just as easily crawl page.php?ID=5 as they can crawl page.php/contact-info.

14

A friendly URL structure may increase the number of people following links from SERP or typing in the URL directly though, which would give more traffic.

15

I agree, although this increase is traffic is relatively negligent which is why I said that the URL structure has relatively nothing to do with increased traffic. (:

This may account for a small number of new visitors relative to almost any marketing or advertising campaign.