Improve the structure of your URLs

Simple-to-understand URLs will convey content information easily

Creating descriptive categories and flenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

(1) A URL to a page on our baseball card site that a user might have a hard time with.

Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.

(2) The highlighted words above could  inform a user or search engine what  the target page is about before following the link.

URLs are displayed in search results

Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document's title and snippet. Like the title and snippet, words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user's query ( ). To the right is another example showing a URL on our domain for a page containing an article about the rarest baseball cards. The words in the URL might appeal to a search user more than an ID number like "www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/" would.

(3) A user performs the query [baseball cards]. Our homepage appears as a result, with the URL listed under the title and snippet