What To Exclude From Your Site URL
Posted in Getting Your Feet Wet, WebMaster on March 3rd, 2008 by DB
Follow these tips and avoid common mistakes made by many webmasters in structuring their website url path.
- Do not include the file extensions as part of the url.
- Do not include server side software details (such as cgi, servlet) as part of the url.
- Do not include affiliate codes as part of the url.
- The only numbers on the url should be the year and the month.
Avoid using .html, .php, .jsp etc as part of your site url. Configure your webserver to not use file extensions. You never know what technology you will be using 5 years from now. Your site migration will be a whole lot smoother if your url extension does not change. Even if you manage your change, you will then need to account for all the back links that you have painstakingly built all these years.
Why advertise what you are running on your server. It is a security risk and best avoided. Again as pointed out above, change is the only constant. For all you know, you could be running on a completely different software platform in the near future.
This one is a no brainer. Many many users simply do not click on a link if they identify the url as an affiliate link. Visitors always hover over the url and switch off the minute they see your affiliate id in the url.
This is important if your website content is time specific. For example, if I were to start a website about currency trading and stock tips, I would ensure that the date stamp is part of the url structure. This will ensure that my readers are clued in as to when the article was written especially if the article is read a couple of years from now.
A visitor to your website should be able to decipher the nature and content of the page by simply reading the url. I personally would trust a website more if I could see a clean and legible url as opposed to numbers, equals and questions marks all over the url. Strive to make your url legible and you most likely will see an increase in back links and as a bonus your SEO score.
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March 13th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
[…] Now if you really want to go the full monty, go ahead and create a separate folder inside the “html” folder for each and every affiliate you deal with. Why? So that you can point your link to the affiliate folder and not the file name itself. Which one do you think looks better? an url ending with “SiteName.com/html/SEOBook/“ or “SiteName.com/html/SEOBook.php“ Personally I prefer the former but then again I have my reasons. […]