Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [156]
As a rule, simple URLs are best. URLs that are especially effective are those that are also understood by humans, because they contain an address that makes sense, using words. My general rule is that the URL shouldn’t be longer than the URL address box in your browser. If it is, then your site may have problems in the search engines (more on that shortly). Refer to Figure 14-1. All the letters, numbers, and characters make a complicated URL, which humans won’t understand, and it may also stump the search engines.
On the other hand, a simpler URL (called a logical URL) is one that employs words rather than a combination of letters, numbers, and characters. Logical URLs use a word that reflects the content of the page. For example, Figure 14-2 shows a page on Etsy that serves up the product as the logical URL.
A simple application of the logical URL has arisen recently. In early 2010, Facebook allowed its users to create vanity URLs for their profiles. Each user can now have their name as the URL after www.facebook.com. Users stayed up late in order to be first in line to get the desired name. This makes publishing your profile and finding friends easier, as well as being able to have your name show up in search engine results for your Facebook page. This also makes company pages easier to spot (see Figure 14-3).
Figure 14-1: Tractor Supply Company URLs are longer than the browser address box.
Figure 14-2: Etsy uses the logical URL with the product name in the URL.
Figure 14-3: Volkswagen’s Facebook page: the vanity URL is a logical URL (www.facebook.com/VW).
Sites with large inventories and multiple classifications often have unwieldy URLs. Anyone who has ever bookmarked a page on eBay may have noticed the URL (see Figure 14-4).
Figure 14-4: eBay’s URL for a product listing
As you can see, the URL contains a hefty amount of letters, characters, and numbers arranged in a chaotic way. This is all information that communicates to the database behind the scenes of the website to arrange the page with particular information. It also may contain various tracking codes, variables, and instructions for the database.
This creates two primary problems. The first is that the more complex the string of characters in the URL, the more problems it will provide for the search engines. Search engines rely on a very simple ability to find and download pages. If the links to those pages are too complex or cause the same page to be downloaded an infinite amount of times, the search engines don’t know how to organize and store the content, which prevents visibility in the rankings.
In this example, the eBay page is not indexed by Google. However, there are many similar pages that are indexed under different URLs (see Figure 14-5). The primary product page that is linked from the eBay home page is not indexed, but seller sites are being found, because they have a “cleaner” URL structure.
Figure 14-5: Google’s index of eBay listings for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: none of them contains the original page with the complex URL.
The second problem is that the URL is part of the user interface (UI). As part of the UI, the URL can help the user as much as hinder the user. When a website uses a logical URL and includes important category labels and keywords, it can help the visitor effectively navigate the website, because the URL can help the visitor determine location and content. Figure 14-6 shows a page from ThinkGeek, where the product and keywords are utilized throughout the content and primary headings and are reinforced by the logical URL.
Figure 14-6: The logical URL on ThinkGeek adds to the context of the page and the understanding of the visitor’s location within the website.
As a pleasant side benefit to assisting the user, adding keywords to the URL also affects search relevance. Additionally, as other