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Why Do You Need to Keep Your URL Short?
Why Do You Need to Keep Your URL Short?
One of the main SEO best practices is to keep your URL short. Actually, you will get a 20% better performance with short URLs than with tall ones. This happens for many reasons. Let’s explain them in detail.
Search engine-friendly URL
Having a tall URL makes it harder for Google to find your content, read, understand and index it especially if you have unnecessary parameters included in the link.
With a tall URL, your website seems disorganized, difficult for search engines, complex, contains non-user-friendly symbols, has subfolders, etc…
Additionally, the length of the URL has nothing to do with having a lower or higher ranking.
On the other hand, very short URLs like http://www.domainname.com/word are also not a good choice. Actually, never imagine it to rank. in Google well…
Thus, you need a proper structure while building your links.
3 risks for having non optimized URLs
In general, any website user prefers short URLs because they are much easier to remember than tall ones.
However, long URLs are considered complex and bothering for readers for many reasons including:
1- Users may end using broken links
When a user copies your tall link intending to paste it in the browser, they may end up copying a part of it only by mistake or thinking that the rest is not important.
2- Readers may get scared of unrecognisable words.
Long URLs may include some unrecognisable words which in turn would scare the users from being scammed or something. Thus, you lose visitors.
3- A bad user experience
Usually, visitors try to read the URL to identify how they are navigating through your website. With a long and complex URL, they may lose track and end by going out of your website. You won’t like that.
SEO and short URLs
Just like your title, meta description, and headings, short URLs help the search engines to identify what your article is talking about. It can even provide more context and lead them. to the location of the file.
For example, if you have a link like this https://domain. com/blog/bestways-for-marketing/. This link shows search engines and readers what your article is about and where it can be funded.
On the other hand, a link like https://domain. com/marketing-blog/blog-topics/best-ways-for-marketing cannot help you know what the page is about
Advice for creating user-friendly URLs
- Start using short URLs from the first day of your site, so you don’t have to change it later and make corrections (301 redirects) afterward.
- Choose a simple domain name that does not have dashes, hyphens, or numbers. (Domain name is the text before.com, .org, .xyz, etc…)
- Use your keyword in your URL tail( URL tail is the text which comes after. com/, .xyz/, .org/, etc…).
- Make sure that your URL explains clearly your topic to your users as well as search engines. Avoid links like https://domain. com/page1.html
- Make your URLs consistent with your web page H1 Headers.
- Stay away from dynamic URLs which are usually created based on the elements clicked previously by users. Such URLs are hardly indexed by search engines and they won’t help your website at all.