Of the many things that impact your company’s online exposure, your website URL is certainly an important one. It won’t make or break your rankings in the search engines. However, the search engine crawlers don’t have eyes and ears and you want to do everything you can to guide them to your website’s content. The more easily your site’s pages get mapped and indexed, the higher your site’s rankings will be. And one of the ways to guide the crawlers is to create a search friendly URLs.
To begin with, you want to buy a domain name that incorporates your best keywords. Now, this is not going to be very helpful to businesses that already have created a website and, thus, have a domain name in place. If you already have built a website and created a bunch of content, it is NOT a good idea to launch a whole new site and lose all the unique content just so you can have a search friendly domain. A search friendly domain is nice, but it is NOT worth more than a bunch of search friendly content that is well optimized and many, many inbound links with the appropriate anchor texts.
However, if you are creating a new website for your business and you are thinking about a domain name, you SHOULD consider your chosen keywords. We mention this because far too many businesses completely dismiss the important of a search friendly URL. If you can incorporate keywords into your domain, the crawlers will have an easier time mapping and indexing your site for your chosen keywords.
All that being said, every company SHOULD OPTIMIZE ITS WEBSITE BY CREATING SEARCH-FRIENDLY WEBPAGES. Remember that the search engines map and index all your site’s pages, not just the homepage. That means you can name your site’s webpages according to the specific keywords for which you’d like to rank highly. This applies to second tier pages (such as menu pages and blogs) as well as third tier ages (buried pages that don’t appear directly on your site’s sitemap).
How to create search friendly URLs to boost your site’s rankings? Look at your second and third tier pages. They all have the same formulation: www.yourdomain.com/webpage. You can change the part of the URL after the forward slash to just about anything you want. Make sure that the URL contains a chosen keyword after the forward slash. This helps Google’s crawlers find your site when they are looking for websites with the quality content that is most relevant to specific searches. When that happens, your webpages will rank more highly for these specific searched keywords.
While search friendly URLs are not the be all and end all of Search Engine Optimization, creating URLS with the search rankings in mind is another good way to boost your site’s rankings and get your business more exposure. When it comes to SEO, every little bit helps. Moreover, you are risking absolutely nothing! So why not do it?