{"id":615,"date":"2016-11-23T14:22:58","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T14:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/?p=615"},"modified":"2016-11-15T14:23:44","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T14:23:44","slug":"role-of-urls-uniform-resource-locators-in-ranking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/role-of-urls-uniform-resource-locators-in-ranking\/","title":{"rendered":"Role of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in Ranking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>URLs are prime ranking factors. A proper URL structure improves a website\u2019s rankings and makes it more user and search engine friendly. So, use it as a starting point to empower your website.<\/p>\n<p>Here are a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/importance-of-technical-audit-in-seo\/\">few technical aspects<\/a> (URL structure) that should be included in your SEO:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Keep your URLs simple \u2013 <\/b>Keep your site\u2019s URL as simple, logical and readable as possible. Complex and too long URLs can confuse users as well as search engines. (Tip \u2013 Keep your URLs short and memorable to improve crawl rates.)<\/li>\n<li><b>Use hyphens \u2013 <\/b>Punctuation is important. Use hyphens in your URLs rather than underscores. This is important to gain rankings in SERP. (Google recommends hyphens.)<\/li>\n<li><b>Consider URL case \u2013 <\/b>Developers often ignore this concept. You should use lower case version in your URL patterns. (Tip \u2013 If you have both the versions on your website, prefer redirection to the lower case URLs.)<\/li>\n<li><b>Avoid using a, an, the in your URL structure \u2013 <\/b>These are known as &#8220;stop words&#8221; and should not be used in URL structure of your website. So, avoid them.<\/li>\n<li><b>Include keywords \u2013 <\/b>Add keywords or key phrases in URL structure to gain prominence from search engines.<\/li>\n<li><b>Use robots.txt \u2013 <\/b>Use robots.txt to stop web crawlers to crawl certain pages of your website. This file also helps you to improve the experience of web crawlers.<\/li>\n<li><b>Use Webmaster tool \u2013 <\/b>Use<b> <\/b>Webmaster tool to check manual actions, HTML improvements and duplicate titles.<\/li>\n<li><b>Session Ids \u2013 <\/b>Avoid using session Ids in your URLs. You can use cookies instead of session Ids.<\/li>\n<li><b>Redirections &#8211; <\/b>Never use too many redirections because it may confuse users as well as search engines.<\/li>\n<li><b>Avoid keyword stuffing \u2013<\/b> Some optimisers stuff their keywords in URLs, which is a bad practice. So, keep your URLs logical.<\/li>\n<li><b>Avoid parameters \u2013 <\/b>Always avoid unnecessary URL parameters to keep your URLs clean and clear.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, follow these URL structure rules to strengthen your website\u2019s architecture.<\/p>\n<p>Quick facts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Pages that use URLs with keywords often rank higher.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Quick tips:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Use hyphens to separate words for readability.<\/li>\n<li>Use Open Site Explorer to research backlinks, identify top pages, view social activity, and analyse anchor text.<\/li>\n<li>A URL should always be shorter than 2083 characters.<\/li>\n<li>Use actual words in URLs rather than long ID numbers.<\/li>\n<li>Session Ids can create massive amounts of duplication, avoid it.<\/li>\n<li>Trim unnecessary parameters.<\/li>\n<li>Avoid using high number of slashes in URLs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>URLs are prime ranking factors. A proper URL structure improves a website\u2019s rankings and makes it more user and search engine friendly. So, use it as a starting point to empower your website. Here are a few technical aspects (URL structure) that should be included in your SEO: Keep your URLs simple \u2013 Keep your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":616,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":617,"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions\/617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cartoozo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}