When it comes to your website, it only takes a second for visitors to form the first impressions about your website. Your URL is often the first thing Google and customers will see and holds much more information than a web page’s location.
URLs provide information, and signals that help search engines understand the content of a page, its context, and its target.
For an SEO expert, a high-quality URL is arguably one of the most important ranking factors.
READ MORE ABOUT Magento 2 SEO Friendly URL.
Here are some of the important keystones to build a quality URL link:
1. Use Your Keywords
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The first thing to do before writing an SEO-friendly URL is to identify the best keyword for the page. That is optimized for searchers and search engines.
Every webpage that you hope will rank in SERPs should have a target keyword, as you will want your page to be discovered by the right people.
So you will incorporate some keyword research into your webpage which is closely tied to your topic or industry. These keywords should have high search popularity (people searching for the term) & low competition in search engines (ranking for the term).
Once you know what keywords your customers use to find answers to their questions, and you know what is lacking in the competition’s answer to those searches, you will have plenty of insight to come into your SEO writing.
The most descriptive of those keywords should be included in the URL, close to the root domain.
How to do the exact keyword “Magento extensions”:
Great URL: https://bsscommerce.com/magento-extensions/
OK URL: https://bsscommerce.com/magento/
Bad URL: https://bsscommerce.com/magento-23456/
Even though this is quite as simple as it seems, it is most often noticed and visible when you share your webpage on social media or displayed on a list of search engine results.
Read More: How To Create Magento 2 Product URL Rewrites.
2. Avoid Excessive Words & Characters
You have noticed that some special characters do not slip into a URL while others don’t. There are several characters (commas are often the culprit) other than the standard numbers and letters you are used to that can work in URLs to make sure a user can understand what your page is about. But not all special characters will cause an issue in your Magento 2 SEO-friendly URLs. There are many safe characters and you don’t need to include every single preposition or conjunction.
Standard (safe) characters:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
a b ABC
Special characters:
$ – _ . + ! * ‘ ( ) ,
And reserved characters: for example used to denote a query.
Other non-safe characters that are poor readability can cause issues for crawlers and lead to unexpected behavior or breaking some browsers.
For example, when the URLs are transcribed or used in different word-processing systems, you shouldn’t use the space character because these words might disappear or change.
Overall, we would recommend sticking with alphanumerics only. If necessary, these unsafe characters can be encoded into the URLs.
3. Case Sensitivity & Hashes
One all in lowercase and the others using occasional capital letters are often found in multiple versions of the same URL. It is more useful when using canonical tags to mark the lowercase URL as the preferred version or, if possible, use permanent redirects.
Hashes: Make it available via a simple URL if the content users are sent to after the # symbol is unique. Using hashes targets a specific section of a page but restricts their use in other circumstances if possible.
4. URL Length
Next on our list of tips is the length of your URL link.
Google will truncate your URL in search results pages for the top-ranking URLs tend to be within 50-60 characters. URL’s longer than 60 characters tend to rank lower than that.
You should use 3-5 words to get your webpage’s message across. Hence, making a shorter URL simply looks cleaner or keeping your Magento 2 SEO-friendly URLs as short as you can, without losing their general meaning.
As mentioned, it is a good rule that the shorter URL tends to rank higher than URLs that are longer. But it is life so we have a few exceptions that can not relate.
5.Don’t forget 301 Redirect Broken URLs
If you want to change a URL, you should not forget to inform search engines of its new location. Google has potentially indexed that page and you don’t want that link to be removed. Especially the link juice from a high-ranking web page, so that’s why they can find your new content on the old URL.
You need to implement 301 redirects on the old URL place to notify search engine bots to crawl your new URL destination.
6. Upload a Favicon
A favicon is the tiny little icon next to your URL in a browser. Favicons have a lot of advantages even when adding one does not have a direct SEO impact on your rankings.
Favicons help better recognize your website brand bookmarks, develop your brand visibility and make your brand more trustworthy.
Adding one has many benefits because there is a definite correlation. There may not be any direct SEO causation from the effects of having a favicon on your site but search engines like Bing and Google have toyed with including favicons in the search results. In all, it’s better to have one.
7. Canonicalize your URLs
When they have filters, for instance sometimes dynamic pages can accidentally create duplicate content. Because you don’t want to get penalized for something you didn’t intentionally do like that, so the must-have is to use canonical URLs.
Even if other ones directly have the same content or making a specific URL to become the preferred one, you need to add a rel=” canonical” link element in the head of any pages to tell search engine bots which links are chosen.
Example: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://yourdomain.com/magento-extensions” />
Another way to avoid duplicates is to set up your dynamic parameters and tell search engines when they should ignore those parameters added to your Magento 2 SEO-friendly URL. This solution can be the case with pagination or session ID.
By doing this, you are telling Google that http://yourdomain.com/keyword?sessionid=54 has the same content as http://yourdomain.com/keyword.
Try using the URL Parameters Tool in Google Webmaster Tools.
8. Add Mobile URLs to a Sitemap
This is a good way to inform search engines which web pages are mobile-friendly and which ones are not. Since the Google mobile update, some experts say that responsive URLs do not need to be included in a sitemap.
But it is safer to do so, those first ones including responsive mobile URLs in a sitemap will rank higher in the SERPs.
9. Block Bad URLs with Robots.txt
By blocking search engines from indexing multiple URLs to the same content and other problematic URLs, you could avoid being penalized for duplicate content. For instance, depending on the user’s filtered search, your site generates dynamic and duplicate URLs to the same content and same feature.
When search engines index duplicates URLs or other unoptimized URLs, they are bad URLs.You can get penalized for duplicate content. To avoid being penalized, you should block those extra URLs using robots.txt or the canonical URL.
10. URLs Must be 100% Readable
If you can’t read every word in your URL, neither can search engines. Search engines as readers, read your URLs before clicking, it helps them know what the page is going to be about.
That’s why you don’t want it to become a huge problem. To provide full comprehension of your content and target, you should not use dynamically generated URLs and customize them. They can’t or they do not even try. Readability helps them better understand your content, so they can connect you with your target market.
For example: if you are an eCommerce shop selling Magento extensions, you should write the dedicated page URL this way:
http://yourdomain.com/magento-extensions
and a wrong way:
http://yourdomain.com/index.php?=5754225=t44=?p=987
If you follow these 10 tips to build a quality SEO-friendly URL, which can significantly increase your chances of ranking on search engines, leading to more exposure and new users/sessions.
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