Source - Webby360
While Covid-19 and its impact continues, the drastic shift of work from ‘physical office’ to ‘virtual office’ and what is now called ‘work from home’ (WFH), SEO (search engine optimization) continues to be an essential part of all business websites and their success.
Before providing you with some tips or steps on how to use them in your URL, let me give you a brief insight to it’s concept.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the practice of using keywords that will increase both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as provide exposure to your brand or content through non-paid search engine results.
SEO provides an easy understanding of what people are searching for online, basically where the audience interest lies. These search engines provide what is called the difficulty level of the word in terms of SEO difficulty, paid difficulty and cost per click. It also provides the search volume of the words.
Knowing the aforementioned aspects can make your job easier to connect with people all over the world who are searching for solutions or answers online that you offer.
SEO 101 - Why Has It Become so Important?
SEO has become an essential element of online business platforms and their respective websites. It is important to advertise your product through social media as well as other platforms by leveraging traffic on your website since the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.
The results from such engines appear more credible to the searchers and help in receiving more clicks than paid advertisements. Optimizing your sites using SEO keywords can help deliver high quality, relevant and credible information to end users. However, SEO is only one of the online marketing channels.
To read more on the concept and main stages of SEO read the article here.
How to Find Keywords for an SEO URL?
Before diving into the steps, knowing what are these keywords that are spoken about is essential, and to help you out with that, here are some easy and simple articles on the same for you to read - What are Keywords? & Why are they still important in 2021?
Step 1: Target Keyword
Before writing an SEO embedded URL, one has to identify the keyword for the page. As every webpage has its own target keyword that may rank in SERPs, that one has to categorize and identify.
Step 2: Best Keywords - How to Choose?
Once page is created for a content, the next step is to find and choose the best keywords suitable for your website, and it can be done by being mindful of the following -
The keyword should be closely related to your topic.
The keyword should have a high search popularity (use search engines for the volume strength of the words).
Low competitive keywords (so your website can rank for the term).
You can use sites like Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, Ubersuggest, Growth Bar, SE Ranking, etc. to identify them.
Step 3: Easily Readable
Easy URLs provide a better read for humans and accessibility for search engines.
Step 4: Avoid Obvious Mistakes
Many beginners make these mistakes when searching for SEO keywords -
Only searching for the SEO keyword once.
Not updating or expanding their SEO keyword list.
Target keywords that are too popular and competitive.
Using parameters in the URL.
To know how to avoid these mistakes, here is a Basic Guide for you.
Once these requirements are fulfilled, you can also use these keywords in your content and then include them in your URL to reach out to more people.
How to Use Keywords for an SEO URL?
1. Use the keyword in the URL - Include the exact keyword in the permalink portion of the URL.
2. Choose a top level domain for your URL - Simply using “.com” would also be the best choice apart from using others such as, .biz, .tel, .pro, etc.
3. Avoid using special characters in the URL - Usage of special characters often creates problems in the URL and causes the links to break.
4. Use the keywords in the page title as well as connect the URL to it - Match the structures of the URL and page title as closely as you can.
5. Avoid using unnecessary words in your URL - Use short URLs often as they last long and create less problems with search engines. Use words that provide clarity as close as possible to your topic with minimum characters.
6. Avoid numeric labels that are automated - Numeric values appear messy and often create confusion while also providing an awkward labeling appearance. Use words and phrases that readers can easily understand.
7. Leave out some words - Like the use of and, but, the, is, on, a, etc. They are called ‘Stop Words’ that may take up unnecessary space in your URL causing it to lengthen. Use methods for cleaner-looking URLs.
8. User Intent - You may use words like ‘how to’, ‘what is’, etc. to make up the search query as they ensure to rightly optimize your content on your website.
9. Meta descriptions - Provide a clear and specific meta description to increase the ranking and sell your content.
10. Punctuations - Avoid/control using punctuation characters as it may cause difficulty in readability and may potentially break certain browsers and proper phrasing.
11. Redirections - URL must not hop to more than two redirections as it may slow down the count as well as the servers.
12. Case sensitivity - Be mindful of case sensitivity in the URLs to avoid directing readers to a site they are not looking for.
13. Preferred separators - Hyphens and underscores are preferred as word separators over special characters such as /,&,@, brackets, etc.
14. Automations - Avoid automated URLs.
15. Repetitions - Lastly, avoid keyword repetitions.
Below is an example of how the keyword ‘Canon EOS 6D’ is used in the title (page) tag, meta description as well as the URL.
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| Source - URL Structure |
Conclusion
A well-structured URL with embedded SEO keywords is all you would want. But this does not come easily. Hence, use the best practices to create a friendly SEO URL that will look better on platforms, improve your content or page ranking and appear more professional on search engines pages.
Try your best to avoid the obvious mistakes search marketers or searchers make to get the attention of the readers towards their page or content. However, one has to ensure several variables and technical aspects have been taken into consideration to perform the above task.
And of course, it is a little complicated and seems too much work but breaking down the process into steps and being mindful while practicing daily, optimization becomes manageable.
Written By - Umme-Aiman
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