Rahul Pandey : website URL best practices
All the suggestions /advices given on this page are only meant for "Information" and these are crux of my experiance in SEO Internet Marketing Industry. You are welcome to read and be more informed about various aspects of Internet Marketing. Your any suggestion for any improvement/enhancement of this page is welcome. Please send your view here - rahul@rahulpandey.in
1. All words should be separated by hyphen not under score or any other meta character (?, _, !,~ etc) .
2. Use self explanatory URLnames. Like for a page related to discount book should be named as www.abc.com/discount-book.html NOT as www.abc.com/discount_book.html .
3. No Nesting of URLs. URLs like abc.com/book/discount/shopping/online/uk/deals are dangerous. Go for max 1or 2 level of nesting.
4. Your URL name should not consists of several keywords separated by hyphens as those URLs will be treated as SPAM in some cases. In my personnel view max 2-4 words are allowed but all 2-4 words should not be keywords only.
eg –abc.com/cheap-discount-book-online-shopping-uk-by-Johan-special-dicount-at-bulk-buy-avaialble (not a good URL naming convention. It look more like a sentence than URL) It should be like abc.com/ discount-book- shopping-uk
You might argue that when several big brands like ebay, tripadvisor etc are using longer URL names and ranking in SERPs then why not you? Answer is even if they will write a book in their URL still they will rank high because they are BIG BRANDS. That much big that bo search engine can dare to drop them out of Index.
5. Space in URL should be handled carefully by replacing space by hyphen. Like abc.com/discount book.html should be abc.com/discount-book.html if you use dynamic urls you should rewrite your page as example given below –
abc.com/book.php?id=discount should be re written to abc.com/discount-book.html using .htaccess files.
AND
URL like abc.com/book.php?id=5498 should be re written to abc.com/discount-book-5498.html using .htaccess files.
Other resources on same topic you may refer are –
seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls
searchenginejournal.com/seo-best-practices-for-url-structure/7216/
forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=15391
