Url Structures & Google's New Search Engine Optimisation Guide

When we heard about Google's new search engine optimisation (SEO) guide we were very intrigued in the office. Would it reveal any new information?

Yes it did! What has been really interesting to discover was the dedicated section on improving the structure of URLs. Since the Search Engine Strategies conference in 2009 we believed that the structure of URLs was very important and something which is incredibly difficult to program in ASP.NET.

Our genius programmers managed to create a piece of software which would rewrite the urls of websites hosted on Microsoft servers. Not only can you name directory structures you can also add long keyword strings to the end of the URL. You can change them as often as you like - allowing you to optimise your site to the deepest levels. The information that Google has released has been more specific than previous and confirmed what we believed.

Ok, lets look at things in more detail.

Naming Directory File Structures

People have said that it's not necessary to rename the directory structure, we disagreed with that and now the mighty Google has confirmed that our beliefs are right. We believe that you should give people as many different ways to navigate a website as you can - after all it's very presumptious to think you know how people will use your website. They may choose to cut a bit from the end of your URL to find more generalised information for example.

Google thinks so too and says so on page 11 of its new SEO starter guide. We would like to draw your attention to the best practices section on page 9 of Google's SEO Starter Guide. This confirms that your URL should contain keywords, and that directory names should be relevant to the information they contain.

Easy To Understand URLS

Google also says (on page 8) that "Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organised but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines." Well we all want our site crawled better by search spiders don't we?

In addition, URLs that have named directories are more easily understood. Users can understand the structure of your website address and aren't intimidated by the programming language that makes no sense to anyone other than programmers. If your URL is easy to understand it's also easier to remember.

In the words of Google, "If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would."

I'm going to get that printed on a t-shirt.

In relation to Google's Answer Highlighting, this means that any word in your URL which is relevant to a search will be displayed in bold - giving searchers more confidence in clicking on your link. Organically.

SEO normally involves a lot of speculation as it is generally a very subjective topic. It's great to receive some concrete information that confirms our beliefs and validates our software as an invaluable tool for organic SEO.

Posted by Dan at 05/10/2010 10:05:00