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Before reading this tutorial, it may be helpful to read our tutorial
Introduction to URLs tutorial, which explains all of the various "sections" of a URL.  You can read this tutorial by clicking here.

SEO Friendly URLs

Now that we have learned about all the different sections of a URL in our Introduction to URLs tutorial we can now discuss how to best optimize a URL for the search engines.  However, before we begin we need to make two important points:

1. As will be made clear in a moment, placing your keywords in your URLs can help your rankings, but remember that changing your existing URLs without redirecting it to a new one will break all the links and bookmarks pointing towards that URL causing the page to drop out of the search engines.  This means that if you have an existing high-ranking page, it’s almost never a good idea to change the URL.  If you must change it, be sure to use a 301 redirect to make sure links, user traffic, and search engines are properly sent to the new URL.
    
2. As a stand-alone strategy, putting the keyword in your URL won’t matter much.  However, when all else is equal, it is a fact that the webpage with the keyword in the URL will outrank and receive more click-throughs than a page without it!

Sub domains
One potentially effective place to put your keywords (although this varies from time to time) is in the sub domain of your URLs.  The search engines often times assume that there is a strong correlation between keywords found in the sub domain and the content of the page, thus providing a potential boost in the search engine for that keyword.  However, given that it is easy to abuse this fact (as many people have done), the search engines no longer place the same value on keywords found in sub domains (or anywhere else in the URL, for that matter) as they once did.  Still, all things considered, if used responsibly it is likely to help and unlikely to hurt.   For starters, it is worth remembering that not only the search engines view your URLs, so do your customers when (hopefully) your site shows up in the search engine results.  Placing your keywords in the sub domain tells people what that page is about, thus helping increase the chances that they will visit your site if the content of your page relates to what they are looking for.  Also, having your keyword in the sub domain means that if someone links to your site using your URL then your keyword will appear in the anchor text (anchor text is the text which appears in a link, such asSEO Friendly URLs which links back to this page) .  As we explain in our tutorials about link building, having your keywords in the anchor is one of the most important steps you can take to optimize your site. 

With that said, don’t get carried away placing keywords in your sub domains.  Remember, the search engines hate spam and love relevance.  Avoid any actions which you are doing solely for the search engines.  For instance, it is common practice to have a one word or phrase sub domain.  It is not common practice to have multiple phrased sub domains (such as keyword1.keyword2.keyword3.yoursite.com).  Actions which are out of the ordinary raise the search engines virtual eye brows and could get your site penalized.  What is acceptable is taking advantage of ordinary practices to boost your rankings, as such it is ok to add a relevant keyword to your sub domain.  Indeed, the search engines want to know what your page is about and anything that you can legitimately do to let them know that can only benefit you.  Along those lines, you should only use a sub domain at all (regardless of the keywords that you place in their) if you have a significant number of pages within that sub domain.  Take a look at Google as an example.  Most of Googles site is located somewhere on www.google.com (such as www.google.com/adsense).  They only assign a sub domain for sections which are like sites in and of themselves.  For instance, news.google.com, groups.google.com, and froogle.google.com.  If you wish to employ a sub domain on your site, make sure that you place a lot of unique content in each section.  Otherwise, the search engines are going to suspect you of spam and your site may be penalized. 

Domains
Your domain, of course, is your registered domain name (such as www.sembasics.com).  It is important to note that while the ranking advantages enjoyed by keyword-smart sub domains also apply to domains, you don’t have the flexibility of modifying your domain name in the way that you can with
sub domains.  Also, there are many extremely successful sites whose domain names have nothing at all to do with their products and/or services (such as Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay, and others). With that said, most of us can benefit from placing our keywords in our URL, particularly if the keyword in our URL matches the keyword being searched for.  Ideally, you want your primary keywords (or keyword combination) to be in your domain name.  If that is not possible, though, try to get other important keywords in your domain name.  If that is also not possible, you will just have to settle for placing your keywords in other, useful sections of your URL (such as your sub domain or subdirectories).

Also, don’t worry about hyphenating your keyword.  It is true that a few years back hyphenated keywords within some domain names enjoyed a small ranking advantage, but today the major engines are getting better at picking keywords out of a phrase without the help of dashes (at least in the English language). As such, that advantage doesn’t really exist any more. Of course, you may want to secure both URLs to keep the other one out of the hands of your competitor, just make sure to develop the URL without the hyphen as your primary site.

Subdirectories and file names.
If you can’t get your keyword into the domain name and it isn’t advisable to put it into the sub domain, then your next best option is to place it in the subdirectory or file name.  Bear in mind that it really doesn’t matter if you use a subdirectory or a file name to contain the keyword.  Typically one (but not both) will help search ranking.  Multiple repetitions in the URL are typically associated with spam and ranked lower.  For example http://www.domain.com/keyword.html is ok. Whereas http://www.keyword.com/samekeyword.html is probably overkill.  Examine the search results for your keywords and look at what is scoring at or near the top. You’ll see the pattern quite clearly as to what is good and what isn’t.

Subdirectory names are also sometimes important for other reasons. Take, for example, /cgi-bin/.  Historically that’s been a subdirectory avoided by search engine robots for fear of getting trapped in an infinite loop and indexing millions of unique URLs that are actually just duplicate pages.  For the most part, however, search spiders have solved this problem and will index URLs that contain cgi-bin.  Still, we suspect some limitations still remain, so, ideally, you should avoid using that specific subdirectory name whenever possible.  Other similar directory names that may have built-in limitations are popular software program names like /phpBB/ for the PHP Bulletin Board software and /Gallery2/.  If you install one of these programs we would recommend that you use a unique directory name whenever possible just to ensure you’ll avoid whatever limitations to indexing that might still be lingering.

File Extensions
Typically the file extension does not affect my search ranking (at least as long as the extension is one that is commonly associated with a web page). We have not seen a case where this mattered at all in the last couple years. Of course, .html or .htm is the most often used file extension. But more and more we are seeing file extensions in the top 10 search results that include .cfm, .php, .asp, and .aspx. Ranking-wise, all of these file extensions are equal in the eyes of the engines.

Fine tune your URL structure
Here are some other points worth considering when optimizing your URLs for the search engines. 

• The more generic your keyword, the earlier you want it in your URL structure.
  For instance, you want to place keywords like music in either your domain or sub domain name and more specific keywords like a particular model number as a subdirectory or file name. 
   
• Use static (as opposed to dynamic) URLs
  A static URL looks something like this:  http://www.mallsite.com/clothing/shirt/blue/large.  A dynamic URL looks something like this:  http://www.mallsite.com/clothing/filename.php?item=shirt&color=blue&size=large.  A site rarely gets fully indexed when there are more than three variables in dynamic URL.  If possible avoid using more than two.  And, ideally, use static URLs.  If it is not possible for you to use static URLs then consider a mod_rewrite (see our upcoming tutorial on using mod_rewrite for more details).
   
• Avoid using Session IDs

There are also some specific variable names– like ID – that indexing-bots often avoid.  That’s due to what are called session variables—a variable (i.e., number) that is unique to each visitor to the site.  I.e., each time someone visits a particular page, a new number is generated inside the URL of that page for that particular visitor, as such the URL changes with each visitor.  The search engine spiders, thinking that the URL indicates a new page, can get "trapped" downloading the same page over and over again.  This is something which wastes the search engines time and resources and thus they the search engines programmed their bots do their best to avoid URLs that appear to have a session variable.  If you are operating a dynamic site you should, ideally, avoid using session variables whenever there is an alternative. If you feel that you have to use session IDs then you should find a way to prevent the search engines from crawling those URL paths.  The most effective way to prevent indexing problems with session variables is to use a good IP delivery program that will recognize search engine spiders and make sure they only receive URLs which have had the session variables removed.    

• Absolute Vs. Relative URLs

An absolute link means you use the entire URL: http://www.domain.com/filename.html, whereas a relative link simply refers to: filename.html.  When referring to pages on your own site either link works fine.  Nonetheless, absolute URLs are preferred for some minor reasons.  For instance, with absolute links the links will work if someone (legitimately or not) downloads your content or saves it to their desktop for the links will send anyone who uses that "site" back to your site.. Also, absolute URLs help avoid getting a dumb-bot stuck in a loop that increases server load and generates 404 errors. 

All in all, it is worthwhile to optimize your URL’s.  They may not be the meat of a good search engine marketing campaign, but they can help to spice it up a bit.

Next tutorial:  Keyword Strategy
Previous tutorial:  Introduction to URLs

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based off of an article published in SearchEngineNews.com.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.