URL Naming Best Practices

[daisy]

The URL of a webpage is an important factor as far as search engine optimization is concerned. Right after the title tags and meta description, a meaningful URL is considered a strong signal towards the “intent” of a page because, apart from Anchor text, a URL is the only parameter that can be used to “judge” a page before visiting it.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/url- ... gle+Reader

[AnthonyM]

Thanks for the share, These are very small things to be noted in optimizing a website for search engines, but many people usually missed out these things. On the other hand, these kind of URL naming practices make the site more user friendly too, which Google strongly recommends.

[Mike-R]

Yeah, it is a small but important bit of SEO. Having keywords in the path can help with your search results performance directly in that Google will bold keywords not just in the title and meta description, but also in the display URL in the SERP results. Of course more bolding == more eye catching.

Some SEOs have also speculated that Google's algo might look at the number of "levels" or "folders" in a URL and use that as a basis for determining how important a page is in overall domain structure. Personally, I think this is unlikely, as it made some amount of sense in old '90s web development, but not in a modern CMS. Still, shorter URLs are more user friendly and will show up completely in the SERPs if you keep them down below 115 characters.