How to Optimize Your URLs for the Search Engines

Other than hiring a professional seo copywriter, one of the first (and easiest) ways to optimise your web pages for the search engines is to include your main keywords in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Otherwise known as your website address!

For example, if you have a business that repairs digital cameras, your URL should include those keywords.

The title of your site could be something like www.digital-camera-repair.biz or www.digitalcamerarepair.net, for example.

This is important because search engine algorithms look at the full web address or URL of a web page to help determine relevance (along with other information such as the page's content (keywords), title, inbound links etc, which we'll discuss fully later on in the blog).

With millions of web pages to choose from, the search engines are always looking for pointers of relevance to a particular search phrase. Therefore, in order for your web pages to rank higher, you need to help the search engines determine what your page is all about as quickly as possible. And as the example above demonstrates, you can do this by making your web page URL as relevant to its content as possible.

To make your website pages even more focused, you could include a relevant suffix at the end of each page's URL, which includes your keyword.

To give you an example, let's say that a mortgage company have two identical web pages containing information on UK house prices.

One URL is named mortgagecompany.com/ukhouseprices, while the other one is called mortgagecompany.com/page12345678/

All other things being equal, it's not hard to imagine which one would feature highest in the search results for the search term "UK house prices". Obviously, the keywords in the first example will be picked up by the search engines who will determine that this web page is more relevant to the search phrase than the second example.

So, if you have more than one page within your website, then each page should have a different URL that reflects what that page is all about through the inclusion of keywords. Once again, this will help the search engines when it comes to matching up search terms and web pages.

The website www.moneysupermarket.com, for instance, has many other pages within the site, such as:

moneysupermarket.com/savings
moneysupermarket.com/insurance
moneysupermarket.com/motoring
moneysupermarket.com/mobilephones
moneysupermarket.com/shopping

And by making each page's URL relevant to its content, they are able to attract more targeted visitors to their website.

Remember, having relevant URLs that match up to the page in question is the easiest thing to get right, and the best place to start when launching your own seo strategy.

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