Last Updated on May 15, 2024 by Team Experts

URL structure is a difficult SEO topic. You cannot master it by just reading or doing it once, it takes time but it’s not impossible. 

We will try to cover every aspect and give examples in this blog to make things easily understandable for you.

What are URLs?

A URL (short for Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a resource on the internet. 

URLs are important just like the address is important to home.

Suppose you are going to a new place and have the address with you, it will be easy for you to reach your destination. Just like this URLs help browsers and servers to reach the landing page. 

There are a lot of technical things to keep in mind about URLs. However, now-a-days most of them are not an issue since they are well handled by the servers and platform.

The platforms are evolving, making it so easy that the structure of URLs is often neglected. It’s not easy to understand and that’s why no one tells us why we should pay attention to the URLs.

People neglect the URLs and ends up having a huge website with bad URL structures.

So, it’s better to make the things right from the start instead of fixing them later.

Why URLs Are Important for SEO?

Many SEO experts have emphasized on the importance of URLs for SEO.

The question comes to mind is are they important?

Yes, they are important. 

For optimizing URLs you can use prestashop friendly url. 

Does URL Structure affect Rankings?

 There are many issues related to URLs that affect the rankings. The important ones are the keywords and length of your URL. 

First thing first, make sure that your URL is valid. Strictly use the allowed URL characters. Use dashes instead of underscores. Also, if you don’t know about the URL characters stick to the letters and numbers.

URLs having keywords help you rank better for a specific phrase. For example, if I want to write home and garden it’s a good approach to write it as “/homeandgarden”.

URL Uniqueness

URL has to be unique. You can’t have same two URLs. 

Same Content on Different Pages

Google don’t like the same piece of content on different pages. Duplicity is the main issue and it is linked to URLs.

Imagine you have a product that falls in same two categories. However, if your website URL structure is hierarchical, then there is a chance that the product is being showed on two different URLs having same content.

URL Types

URLs can be of two types: One is dynamic URLs and other is static URLs.

Websites that have huge data – Ecommerce store, have both static and dynamic URLs. 

A platform that has a database probably has dynamic URL protocol.

All the URLs are static when indexed. Change anything in the URL without 301 redirections google will consider that the page is gone and will de rank it.

Canonicalization

Canonical tags are used to fix duplicate content issues, if you have duplicate pages, you can select which one to show on the SERP by adding a canonical tag. Basically, it tells the google “show this page instead of that page”.

301 Redirects

If you change the URL of a page, Google will think that the page is gone and the new page is a fresh one. 

It means that the old ranking will be lost and the page has to rank again. You have to do all the work again to get it ranked.

To keep the ranking and let google know that the old page URL has been changed, you have to use 301 redirections.

People often forget to properly use 301 redirections when merging websites. Make sure to use 301 redirects properly.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are the path of your website. You can implement breadcrumbs in multiple ways. 

You can add breadcrumbs by looking at the URLs and site structure of your website. It tells google about the path to the respective pages. 

For example, if you list the featured product wooden bed on the homepage and the customer clicks it, user click path breadcrumb would be home>wooden bed.

It is not useful if the customer wants to find other beds too.

Instead of using that breadcrumb, use breadcrumb like home>category>beds>woodenbeds

Subdomain vs Subfolders

When structuring the website, you can use subdomain or subfolders. You can use the subdomains if you have good internal linking strategy.