Does Your Blog URL Affect Your SEO?

The short answer is yes, your blog post’s URL does affect your SEO. Your URL is one of the many places that you can utilize keywords – but, keyword stuffing, misspelling, random letters/numbers, and even simple structure can change how Google reads and ranks your content.

As a well-established site on the internet, most large companies do not need to worry about the specifics of their URLs. As a business establishes its presence online and competes with these businesses, your URL can become the small boost you need to overcome its content.

What is the Structure of a URL?

URLs consist of six main parts, the protocol, subdomain, root domain, top-level domain, slug, and article permalink. These parts come together and create the URL that is necessary to locate and load every website – and every URL is unique to the targeted page.

For simple SEO, you need to mainly focus on the slug section of your URL. The slug section of your URL is the easiest to alter or change when creating your content.

What is an SEO-Friendly URL?

If your blog is through WordPress, it’s very likely that you’ve already adjusted your URL style in your backend. Typically, you can choose from URLs that include your:

• Post date
• Category
• Subcategory
• Blog Name
• Author

While these are great options for tracking or maintaining the who, what, and when of your blog post – they’re not necessary and tend to make it harder for users to just “type and go,” and useability/user-friendliness is considered when optimizing for SEO.

Your URL should be structured in a way that delivers the information of your content, without cluttering the search bar. Good URL structure should also include your primary keyword (if possible) and keep in mind the purpose of your content such as considering if the article/blog post is a content pillar or if the keyword you’re attempting to rank for is a long-tail keyword.

The correct way to structure your URL is: www. yourwebsite . com / keyword or / long – tail – keyword

For example, for this article, my goal is to rank for “How to Structure My URL When Blogging” and “Correct URL Structure for SEO” so the end of my URL may look like:

/how-to-structure-urls-for-seo

Keep it simple, straight to the point, and adaptable (in case you update your content later down the road).

What NOT to Include in Your URL

While listing the do’s and don’ts on URL structure sounds a bit funny to me – it does come in handy. So, now that we’ve covered the correct structure of a blog URL, here are a few things you should avoid:

• Special Characters: They won’t show up in your URL after being published.
• Numbers: You want to be able to update yearly (or whenever), keeping numbers out ensures adaptability.
• Extra Filler: There’s no need, boil it down to the bare minimum!

Final Thoughts on SEO-Friendly Blog URLs

The great thing about URLs is that they’re super easy to customize and they take little to no additional time in your content marketing strategy. For something so simple, it makes sense to take this little extra step when the results could lead to free traffic from Google.

Although URL structure is not the only thing you need to keep in mind when creating blog content, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

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