What is URL structure and can it affect SEO?
Your site URL structure (website page addresses, also called 'links') and the keywords you include in the URLs can impact your SEO and overall page rankings. Keep them in a logical hierarchy and as short as possible.
A basic rule of thumb is to keep your URLs human readable, as short and relevant as possible and to avoid joined keywords and underscores (_). For example, for a page about 'New Porsche Range', a good URL would be 'new-porsche-range', not 'newporscherange' or 'new_porsche_range' and certainly not 'search?makes%5B%5D=porsche'.
Is URL structure important for SEO?
The URL structure is an important factor for SEO. It's not the most important ranking factor, but it is a ranking factor none the less.
A URL consists of a 'protocol', a 'domain name' and a 'path'. For example, in the case of this page, the protocol is 'https://', the domain is 'creativitysells.com' and the path is /seo/site-url-structure, which results in the full URL being '/seo/site-url-structure/'
In terms of the importance of URL structure when it comes to SEO, there are two key influencing factors, 'User Experience' and 'Page Rank'.
User experience
Consider what your URLs look like from the user's perspective. Using this page as an example, it's very clear to the user that it's a page about 'SEO and URL Structure' as the URL is short and 'human readable', i.e. '/seo/site-url-structure'. If the URL was something like '/index.php?pid=38298ao_9k' there would be no way that a user could know, from the URL alone, what the page is about.
Page rank
The URL structure of a site informs the search engines what pages exist on a website, and how they relate to each other - internal links also help here. When your URL structure is well planned and follows a logical hierarchy, it can help with your overall SEO as your site will have better search engine crawlability and URLs are a ranking factor in the search engines.
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