URL structure is a very important part of a website. It makes your website clear, attract more readers and helps your site get more page rank on search engines. There are many websites using very bad URL structures in the internet. This is an example of bad URL:
or
http://www.domain.com/2008/07/27/archives/?p=420
With these types of URL, they don’t make any sense with Google and other search engines. Search engines spiders have to continue to check the post content to know what the main content is. Therefore, it reduces the ability of your website to get higher rank on search engines. This is an example of good URL structure:
or
http://www.domain.com/category/post-title
With the post title or category or both in the URL, search engine spiders can easily determine the content of the post. As a result, the page can have higher ability to appear in the top search result.
Using optimal URL for your website is very important. You should choose an optimal URL structure for your website straight from the beginning because it will be really difficult to change it afterwards. If there are so many readers subscribing to your site URLs, it’s so hard to change their structure later. An optimal URL structure should not strange characters on the perma links, it should be short and best describe the content of the page.
Another thing I want to mention is the main URL (domain) of your website. Most of websites have two type of main URL, with and without www. For example, http://www.blogger24h.com and http://blogger24h.com . But some websites only enable one of them. You should enable these two type of URL to attract more visitors to your website. Readers can type both www or without www to go to your site. But you should choose a main URL for your website. If you like an URL having www or without www, only choose one as the main URL. The remaining URL will be redirected to the main URL. This will help search engines not to divide your site rank into two halves(two URLs point to one website).
To specify the main URL and redirect the remaining URL to it, you should add the following code to your .htaccess file on your server.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.blogger24h\.com$[NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.blogger24h.com/$1 [R=301,L]
The code above will redirect the URL http://blogger24h.com to the main URL of my blog http://www.blogger24h.com. Replace my domain blogger24h with yours. The code works on Linux servers with Apache Mod-Rewrite enabled.
2 Comments Received
July 27th, 2008 @6:11 pm
I use this URL structure:
http://www.domain.com/2008/07/27/post-title
Seems to work well. Has the convenience of keeping the date, as well as allowing me to have multiple posts with the same title. Mind you, I don’t think I have any posts with the same title, but this avoids problems if I did.
July 28th, 2008 @2:06 am
Yes, I agree with you,dcr. Having the date in URL keep your posts away from conflict in title. But I think it’s not good to have too many numbers in an URL. So I only use the year and the month in the URLs of my blog.
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