SEO URL Factors

SEO URL Factors to consider:

First and most importantly, lets clean up all those ugly messy URL's and make them look good.  Lets get rid of all those PHP variables and use .htaccess to make them look nice.

Next, try to always keep the URL's simple in nature, too often we see URL's that include nearly a whole sentence.  This is a mistake, they really should not be more than 3-4 words max.  

SEO URL's should be easily readable with easily understandable word use.

Also, try to make sure you don't create duplicate content by having more than one URL pointing to the same webpage.

Eliminate the use of all special characters except the hyphen/minus "-" sign, and the underline "_".  We have always recommended the hyphen/minus sign rather than the underline, but some SEO's debate this and still prefer use of the underline.

It is also helpful to simulate a real directory structure with slashes "topic/subtopic/", or if you are building your website page by page name your directories with keyword consideration in mind.

Use numbers for Marketing, not for anything else.  3-seo-url-tips for instance but not download/version/3/

And forget about dates, to many people keep default rewire setting in WordPress for instance which use dates to archive older posts and articles.  Date are not important in standard search engine keyword ranking.

Try to keep your URL's the same, avoid changing them whenever possible.  If changing the URL's in a necessity be sure to use a “301 permanently moved” redirect to notify all the search engines the to the web-pages new URL.