Onsite SEO URL Tips 

May 13, 2015

By  Jeff J Hunter

Making a SEO URL is a very important part of optimization. This is one of the factors that the website crawlers examine. The URL structure needs to have a certain set of standards attached to the formation of an URL. In this article, you are going to get URL SEO tips!

If you have not checked on the requirements of what you need before even starting, go to Onsite SEO Requirements. If you have all the requirement and have not created the title for your post yet, go back and read Onsite SEO Title Tips before trying to construct the URL.

Important SEO URL Tips and Tricks

This is the most important URL tip there is: If at all possible, create the URL only once! It is best to have as few errors in the database as possible. If there is a history of changing URLs, this creates multiple 404 errors. (This includes the improper use of SEO tags, which will be discussed in its own article.)

The more of these errors a site has, the less authority the site gains. To be blunt, if you mess up the URL portion, you are hurting your bottom line. So, please pay attention!

A common URL address is http://www.yourwebsite.com/category/pid=6008. For a page or blog post, the URL should have this structure: yourwebsite.com/title-of-post-with-dashes. By having the http://www. removed from your URL, you have much more room for your actual keyword.

Stop Words In The Name of Love

Another mistake that is made when dealing with keywords and URLs is the conflict of stop words. Stop words are like the prepositions in a phrase that are normally bounced out of the title. This is why a good keyword strategy is so important to catch these things!

Let’s take the example above. Let’s say our keyword is “title of the post”. As you can see from the URL structure above, it says “title of post”. That means that this URL is NOT optimized for your keyword. This is where you need to go in and manually fix the URL structure to yourwebsite.com/title-of-the-post-with-dashes.

Military Intelligents

Also, quickly double-check that your primary keyword phrase is spelled correctly. See here: yourwebsite.com/title-of-the-post-with-dashes. By missing this small examination of the URL, that is enough to start causing havoc with your website.

By the way, did you notice that “military intelligence” was misspelled in the header above? If you did, bonus points for you!

If your URL is not longer than 80 characters total, includes the correct spelling of the primary keyword, and makes sense for the page or post you are writing, you may now do your first “Save” of your page or post.

Creating A Branded Vanity URL

You may be asking yourself, “What is a vanity URL?”.  This is a rather new trend where people and companies have been creating stylized URLs the same way vanity car plates are made.

The YouTube vanity URL for linking to their videos is youtu.be/the-video-info. As you can see, this is not ending in the typical .com, .org, or .info that we have come to know for web site addresses.

My opinion on having a vanity URL is that they are awesome for outreach and getting conversions, but they can be dangerous to your site without a strategy of utilizing these vanity URL properly. I think vanity URLs should be used for separate websites that are made just for exclusive promotions.

For example, if you use a vanity URL shortener, you need to trust that the database that holds the information that was shortened stays in place for a long time.

SEO URL For Site & Promo Vanity Short URL

As you can see, creating the URL is a very important step for search engine optimization. It is a major stumbling block for website owners that just do not understand how important each URL is to their site. In order to get the correct URL in the correct order, keyword mapping is a necessary step!

Once you have the SEO title and SEO URL in place, you can go onto SEO writing of the content for the page or post. If you have already gathered your content in advance, you are doing a terrific job. If you have not, you still can create content on the fly.

What important SEO URL tips did you learn? Please leave a comment below!

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Digital Marketing Strategist with background in Information Technology, Project Management, and Business Process Outsourcing. An expert in content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and dependent on Virtual Assistants to survive.


As the founder of VA Staffer, he has built a company with over 150+ virtual assistants, specializing in executive assistants and remote teams. Jeff's a master at leveraging AI and human capital to build things fast (and smart). He's a contributor to top business publications such as Entrepreneur and Forbes, and he has been featured on major news networks including ABC and CBS.

Jeff J Hunter

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