HOW TO: create a user-friendly URL
An optimized URLs are important for both search engine optimization (SEO) and your user experience. Search engines like Google will inspect many factors to make decision which URLs should be high on the list. URLs is important to describe a web page to search engines and potential visitors. Therefore, they should be accurate, enticing, and memorable. Here we suggest the six best practices to create user-friendly URLs.
Six Practices for Good URLs
- Describe What You Do – A good URL should include a phrase or term that is linked to the page content.
- Insert some Keywords – You can put the most important keywords in the beginning of the URL so the search engine spiders can easily track them. Note that do not overuse the keywords as keyword stuffing will cause your site being penalized by search engine.
- Use Hyphens, Not Underscores – Hyphens (-) are recommended by Google as hyphens are treated as spaces to separate words while the words connected by underscores (_) are counted as one word.
- Keep it SHORT! – A short URL is more memorable, recognizable and also easier to type and read. A URL that has many similar word might be viewed as keyword stuffing.
- Use Static URLs – Try to avoid using unnecessary parameters like “?”, “=”, and “&”. A static URL is easier for users and search engines to read than a dynamic URL.
- Optimize The Subdomains – It is better to use subfolders instead of subdomains unless you have a specific reason. This is because search engines might have the potential to treat subdomain as a separate entity from the main domain.
For your information, you can also create a user-friendly URL using .htaccess. If your website is using long URL like example.com/files/folder/sitemap.html, you can change it into user-friendly URL “example.com/sitemap” in .htaccess
You can modify this line according to your needs and add this code to your .htaccess file.
We hope this article helped you to learn about how to create a user-friendly URL. For more articles, kindly visit our Knowledge Base.