Accessible URLs

URL Naming

The naming scheme of a URL should not only be presented in a manner that is friendly to search engine crawling activity, but it should also be descriptive of what is contained on the page.  As we will see, descriptive naming of URLs may serve to benefit not only the search engine but also people who are exposed to the URL.

In general, a descriptive URL name reflects the title of the page.  For instance, a page titled “FAQ” may carry the URL name www.knowthis.com/faq.  But what happens if the page is titled “Frequently Asked Questions” and not just “FAQ”?  The URL name could be www.knowthis.com/frequentlyaskedquestions but the lack of separation between the words in “frequently asked questions” presents two problems: one for humans and one for search engines.

The Human Problem

In cases where this URL is visibly displayed as the URL the actual description of the page may not be readily apparent to anyone seeing it in their browser.  For example, as we will see in more detail in a later tutorial, getting sites around the Internet to link back to a site is very important in search engine marketing.  In most cases a webpage’s URL is not visibly displayed in the link but instead is contained as linked text such as KnowThis FAQs.  However, in other cases a site will simply display the full URL such as “Here is a site you should see: www.knowthis.com/frequentlyaskedquestions”.  Clearly, even though the page title is contained within the URL, the fact the words are connected may make it difficult for someone to quickly disseminate the purpose of the page behind the link.

The Search Engine Problem

It is believed that some search engines provide additional weighting to URLs that actually reflect the topic of the page but only if the URL is fully understood.  Unfortunately, run-on words are difficult for search engines to understand.  For instance, consider a page that contains an article possessing the following URL: 

http://www.knowthis.com/mattsmartinidealposition

Without separation the wording may leave open to interpretation the real title of the article.  For instance, the title could actually be one of the following:

• Matts Mart in Ideal Position - possibly referring to a retail store
• Matt Smart in Ideal Position – possibly referring to a person named Matt Smart
• Matts Martini Deal Position – possibly referring to a company named Matt’s Martini

To overcome these problems web marketers should learn to use descriptive URL naming and also to separate words in the URL.  The method for separation is one that is open to much debate in the search engine marketing community, though a “character” separator is probably best.  The options most frequently used for separation are the hyphen (dash) “-“ character and underscore “_” .character.  While the debate on which character is best will not be taken up in this tutorial, it is important for web marketers to use some type of separator between words in a URL.  This applies to both individual content naming and to categories/folders in which a content item is contained.