A URL that is constructed well can provide a variety of benefits for both your site’s SEO and the overall user experience. Amongst many things, investing in SEO services can help to ensure your URL is constructed in a way that will make full use of link building, keyword research, and content creation.
The structure of a URL can also be seen as a reflection of your overall website structure. It can help visitors and bots understand the organization of your site, where your content lives, and how important and/or relevant it may be based on how close to the homepage and root domain it is.
URL structure often parallels your site’s navigation menu — important pages and subfolders may also be included in the header menu.
When the URL is a semantic, well-constructed URL, it makes it easier for the user to navigate through your website. A semantic URL is “made up of logical parts, therefore showing the actual name of the specific web page you’re watching, while at the same time displaying where it belongs in the website hierarchy.” Basically, when the URL uses easy-to-read elements and has clear titles, it helps the user understand where they are on your site without having to guess or assume. For example, YouTube and Google Docs often have URLs that are full of gibberish, rather than descriptive words.
This is another way subfolders and subdomains can be important to your greater SEO goals. Because subdomains can exist on a separate server and feature a unique home page, link equity may not always flow from pages on a subdomain to your root domain. For this reason, having all your blog content housed on a subdomain can be less beneficial than actually putting your blog in a subfolder. Links from blog.yournewsite.org may not flow as readily to the root domain as links pointing to content on yournewsite.org/blog. This isn’t to say that using subdomains negates the value of backlinks — you’ll just want to make sure that before you begin a link building campaign, you understand how your site structure might impact the flow of link equity, and ensure you have an adequate internal linking structure that sends signals to your important pages.
Although they’re subtle, URLs do play a role in determining whether or not a particular page is relevant to the searcher’s intent. In Google’s SERPs, just above the title tag, you can see the page path broken down into something called breadcrumbs. This is generally just a deconstruction of each path or subfolder in the URL, showing exactly where a given page is housed on a website.
A descriptive/semantic URL is also an opportunity to echo the target keywords relevant to a given page. After conducting keyword research, take note of words that feature in the title tag of a page; these may be helpful to include in your URL. When descriptive enough, a clear URL can inspire trust and possibly impact clicks.
Dynamic URLs can be generated to measure clicks from different sources — for example, visitors who click on a social media post may have some tracking code added to their URL, distinguishing them from organic search visitors or those who click an email link. Dynamic URLs can be handy for getting session IDs and other personal data/tracking information/performance monitoring, but you don’t want search engines mistaking them for the preferred version of a page. Any campaign or site using dynamic URLs also needs to be sure to incorporate canonical tagging to ensure search engines recognize the preferred, “real” version of the page, and doesn’t index custom session IDs or other code for search.
A canonical tag is an HTML signal that lets search engines know what version of a page should be considered the “real” or “original” version. This can be important to avoid duplicate content issues with search if you use dynamic URLs, provide your content in different languages, or even migrate your domain.
For example, when you visit Forbes, they always add a session ID to track their site visitors. when you run a search for an article on Forbes, you’ll see that the ranking result does not contain the same session ID at the end — and that’s because the SERPs show the canonical version of the page. Canonical tags are important to avoid competing with yourself or wasting bots time by having them crawl and index multiple versions of a page
