eshop<\/b> – In our example we have chosen to setup our e-shop<\/b> as a subdomain. As a best practice it is recommended to only use subdomains for parts of your website that are completely different from the main site. For instance when you want to separate your e-shop from the main non-commercial website or if you want to have a blog as a part of your content marketing strategy. Note that subdomains act as individual\/separated entities from the main domain (mybrand.com) and as a result they build their own link profile. So, it\u2019s crucial to be very careful if you wish to create a subdomain for your website and dilute your link juice to two or more entities (main domain and one or more subdomains).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n\n- mybrand<\/b> \u2013 Is the domain name of the website. Google used to give extra weight to exact- match domains (EMDs), in other words domains that were bought with the solo purpose to rank high for the domain\u2019s name \/ keyword term. That\u2019s no longer feasible due to an algorithmic update that Google performed in 2012. So, the best practice right now if you start from scratch to build a new website is to use your brand\u2019s related domain name instead of an exact match domain.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n\n- .com<\/b> \u2013 Is the website\u2019s domain extension. The .com is the most popular domain extension. Less popular extensions are .org and .net. Entities such as universities most of the time use the .edu extension. If you are building a website for a local business, let\u2019s say in Greece, it is recommended to use the country\u2019s specific domain extension (.gr). On the other hand if you have a local business that attracts an international audience (e.g a hotel in Chios), the best practice is to buy a .com domain extension and then if your site is multilingual to utilize geo location targeting for each website\u2019s language through Google\u2019s webmaster tools.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n\n- category<\/b> \u2013 Is the website\u2019s subfolder. In order to be useful for the user you must use a descriptive name for all of your website\u2019s subfolders. In our example if you sell online both dresses and skirts, you must have two different pages one for each category.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
Example URL: http:\/\/eshop.mybrand.com\/dresses\/product<\/p>\n
It is possible to have multiple levels of categories. For example if your e-shop offers both clothes for men and women you can have one category for men and one category for women and then a sub category for specific type of clothes (e.g dresses).<\/p>\n
Example URL: http:\/\/eshop.mybrand.com\/women\/dresses\/product<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n- product<\/b> \u2013 This is the actual page, so in our example the page name will be the product\u2019s name.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p>\n
Complete example URL: http:\/\/eshop.mybrand.com\/women\/dresses\/maxi-dress-ilios<\/p>\n
From our complete we can extract the tips below:<\/p>\n
In order to perform effective URL optimization you need to approach it as copywriters. This means that your URLs must:<\/p>\n
\n- \u00a0Be descriptive and as short as possible without words such as a, for, the.<\/span><\/li>\n
- \u00a0Have important keywords placed at the beginning of the URL.<\/span><\/li>\n
- \u00a0Not repeat words: Try not to repeat keywords between category and product (page) name.<\/span><\/li>\n
- \u00a0Use hyphens instead of underscores, as this is the way that Google and other search engines prefer to crawl and index URLs.<\/span><\/li>\n
- \u00a0Must not have capital letters. So, do not CAPITALIZE keywords in URLs.<\/span><\/li>\n
- \u00a0Not be dynamically generated, because this can lead to duplicate URLs due to session ids, sorting options, etc. The best practice so as to fix duplicate URLs issues is to place a rel canonical tag to each non-canonical (duplicate URL) version of your website\u2019s pages.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p>\n
In conclusion, URLs cleaning and optimization can increase usability for users (humans) since it allows them to decipher their URLs quicker and with ease. At the same time URL optimization will help search engines (robots) crawl, index and rank your website\u2019s pages higher due to the enhanced on page optimization that you have performed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things that often webmasters and many times even SEO practitioners forget to optimize for is the URL structure of their websites. In this article we will discuss a variety of best practises that will help you improve … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3574"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3574"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3589,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3574\/revisions\/3589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"SEO\"](\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/SEO1-580x412.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"url-optimization\"](\"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/url-optimization-580x89.png\")
<\/p>\n