Search engine friendly URLs are an essential part of optimizing your website for organic search traffic. Here are 3 easy tips on how to write search engine friendly URLs using targeted keywords. Plus, we'll take a look behind the scenes into show you why SEO friendly URLs are so important.

The Truth About Search Engine Friendly URLs

If you have spent any time trying to find out how get more website traffic through organic search by improving your website's performance in search engine results pages you have probably heard a lot about search engine optimization. Along the way you have been subjected to a mixture of truth and error, plus a healthy dose of secret formulas!

A secret formula ingredient you may not have heard about before is improving the structure of your URLs or creating search engine friendly URLs. Search engine friendly URLs are not a “must have”. However, they are highly recommended. Google recommends you spend some time on your URLs to allow for better crawling and indexing. SEO friendly URLs have the additional bonus points of looking friendlier to searchers and making your listing more inviting and clickworthy.

What is a Search Engine Friendly URL?

By now you should be asking “how in the world can I change my URL?”

Lets’ first consider what a URL is. Your URL consists of:

1. Your domain
2. Your file folders and subfolders
3. Your page file

For example – http://www.bobssportinggoods.com/folder1/1357924.html

Your domain is not an element you can easily change. if your domain name was crafted in the first place to contain keywords in it you are off to a great start. This is often not the case. Many site domain names are a corporate name, a brand or even an acronym. These domains won't help you much for organic search but there is still plenty you can do with folders and file names. We'll get into the nitty gritty of how to do it in a minute. First lets establish why search engine friendly URLs matter.

Search Engine Friendly URLs Create Default Anchor Text

Sometimes visitors to your site will link to your pages. Most often they will simply use the URL itself as the anchor text. Search engine spiders use the keywords in the anchor text as a vote (made by the poster of the link) as to what the web page is really about. So, if the URL doesn’t contain any relevant words and it is used as the anchor text… the search engine spiders will not be given any indication of what the link is for and the link to your site is not as powerful as it should be.

A sample scenario may work best to explain this meaty piece of advice... 

If I am a spider I know the page is about sporting goods of some sort but that's a pretty wide target. It describes the entire site but not the particular page.

Here’s a better example with keywords worked into the folder name and file name:

Now the poster of the link has just told the search spider that he thinks your page is about discount Taylor Made golf clubs -- very specific, and terrific for organic search. And he didn’t have to re-write his link with anchor text ( I mean, come on WHO DOES THAT… nobody!). By using a search engine friendly URL you manage to get keywords into the anchor text here because you made it so easy for the poster of the link to do so.

Search Engine Friendly URL Technical Points

You cannot use spaces in a URL to separate words. So use a dash “-“. Search spiders will treat this as if it were a space and therefore count the words on either side as separate keywords.

Bad Example 1:

Many web masters and designers either run the words together:
http://www.bobssportinggoods.com/discountgolfclubs/taylormade.html

This method tells the search spider your page is about "discountgolfclubs" or "taylormade" –  without spaces neither of these combination of letters constitutes a word with an attached meaning. And that’s exactly how the search engines treat them… total gibberish. Your efforts are in vain andreally  no better than “folder1/1357924”. It tells the search spiders nothing about your web page, how it should be listed or indexed.

Bad Example 2:

Many IT types serve double duty as web masters and they like to use the underscore “_” like so:
http://www.bobssportinggoods.com/discount_golf_clubs/taylor_made.html

Unfortuantely, search engine spiders do not interpret the underscore as a space. So, again your attempt to create an SEO friendly URL is wasted because you are feeding them only a string of gibberish that says nothing about the content of your web page.

Don't let this happen to you! Old habits may be hard to break but using the dash is essential to getting keyword phrases or multiple keywords into your SEO friendly URLs. Make sure your webmaster, webdesigner or IT person understands the importance and follows through.

SEO Friendly URL recap:

• Use descriptive keywords or phrases as folder and subfolder names instead of generic folder names like “folder” or “files”.
• Use descriptive keywords or phrases as file names for your pages.
• If using phrases with multiple keywords in folders or file names use the dash “-“ to separate the words. Don’t use underscores or run the words together