Optimize Your URL To Its Fullest Potential

To the ordinary user, a URL is merely a location holder of a web page on the internet, but in SEO terms, it can be so much more. URLs have the potential to indicate to search engines what type of content is on a page, the purpose, and the target market. That’s a lot of information that can be packed into a tiny URL, but in order to be successful with your SEO, you need to learn what makes a strong URL for search engine ranking.

• First off, only use readable URLs. If a person can’t understand your URL, what makes you think a search engine could?
• Always use hyphens in URLs, Google doesn’t read underscores.
• Your top content should always be housed in the root folder. If you didn’t know, URL structure can signal content because it’s in your root folder. For example: www.matthewfleming.com/custom-web-design.
• Stay away from capital letters in your URL - your URL is case sensitive, so don’t confuse visitors and search engines.
• Nix bad URLs with robots.txt. Search engines need to know to ignore the dynamic URLs that point to your established URL. 
• Mobile URLs are a plus! In order to rank higher in mobile search results, go ahead and list those mobile friendly pages in your sitemaps. You will be doing yourself a huge favor to cater to the mobile crowd.
• In order to avoid the penalty of duplicate content, tell search engines what your preferred domain and web pages are. 
• Upload a favicon. In order to build trust and relationships with your customers, as well as brand recognition, a favicon may be helpful. For those of you who aren’t sure what a favicon is, it is a small square image used by web browsers to show a graphical representation of the site being visited. You will usually find it to the left of the browser’s address bar.
• If you have changes to your website, make sure to tell Google about them by using 301 redirects. This way, you won’t lose any rankings you may have established. 
• URLs can have target keywords. Search engines read a URL to better understand the content of a page, so be strategic about your keywords to get the most out of your listing.