First step after the concept of a website is to finalize the URL structure. URL of a web page is like the address of a person.  Frequent change of address by a person, creates problem in contacting the person and needs reference to the new address or update of the old address. Similarly if the URL of a page is frequently changed it’s a problem for search engine to track the same and correlate to the old one.

Hence it’s best to finalize the URL structure for a web site before we start developing it. Though Google is good at crawling all URLs but it’s better to give a friendly URL. So here I would be discussing the best practices and dos and don’ts for Optimum URL structure. In advance view we can say, the different URL architectures are Themed, Flat and One-Off Site URL Architecture

Basic Over View

Length of the URL: Google can crawl all length of URLs but the best suggested would be to have four to five words in the URL excluding the domain name.

This was suggested by Matt Cutt in his interview, http://www.stephanspencer.com/matt-cutts-interview/. Not taking the suggestion on the face value, I have done little search and noticed it’s the length that Google displays in the Result Page.

He states that if there is more than six words the priority of the words is decreased.

Google SERP Page

There is one more evidence in favor of short URL,  recent research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones http://searchengineland.com/080515-084124.php. So short readable URLs you get both better rankings and better click through.

Short URLs will also help in direct type ins of URLs (if anyone still uses that instead of Google) as it’s easy to remember.

Readable URLs: It’s better to design URLs with words than numbers or other unreadable characters. It also has an advantage of getting direct traffic as remembering the same is easy. If we use “exact match” naming conventions (http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/how-to-reference-material/how-to-increase-relevance-using-consistent-naming-conventions-tags-site-architecture-and-links/)targeted keywords it is highly probable that the click through would be higher, as the searched key words are highlighted as bold in the SERP pages of search engine, increasing the probability to be clicked.

URL is case sensitive: Unlike domain name the URL is case sensitive. This meaning that if by any reason ( choice or CMS or mistake) we stick to a an upper-case version, this can cause a few issues:

• People are most likely to link to the standard lower case format
• We will Lose page authority & link juice as search engine see the URLs as two different page URL
• Some web server is equipped to handle the case sensitive URL but some are not, so loss of traffic
• Suffer from duplicate content issues on search engine Index.

Changing static or Dynamic URL structure: The favorite or advised tactic is to use 301 redirect only for most powerful (in terms of linking and traffic) pages and leave all others to be handled via 404. The search engine loves server side redirections over client side redirections done by JavaScript.

File extensions: (i.e. don’t end your URLs with .exe or .bat http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dont-end-your-urls-with-exe/) as they might prevent your pages from being crawled.

I prefer no extension if possible, as it gives me freedom to move from one technology to another or static to dynamic pages, without any loss of traffic or investment in redirection.

Best practices check list for URLs, believed to be true:

• Fewer the parameters passed in dynamic URL, the better. Less than five word length parameters are much better than seven or eight.
• Superfluous/nonessential parameters like tracking codes to be avoid.
• A clean static looking URL (containing no ampersands, equals signs, or question marks) is more search engine friendly than a dynamic one.
• Having keywords in the URL is better than no keywords.
• The file naming with Keywords is more beneficial than the directory/sub-directory name (this is relative statement; keyword sequencing in URL is appreciated).
• Hyphens are the preferred word separator, although underscores are also used over times. So if you have multiple-word keyword phrases in URLs, it’s recommend using hyphens to separate them.
• Stuffing too many keywords in the URL looks spammy. Four, five or max six words in a URL looks perfectly normal, shorter the better, according to Matt Cutts.
• The domain name is not a good place for multiple hyphens, although as said, sometimes a domain name should have a hyphen, as the domain ‘arsecommerce.com’ or ‘penisland.com’ demonstrates (Hope you get this joke!).

Looking forward for your comments.