Optimise your blog
Do you ever ask the question: “What is best practice when it comes to how to optimise blog URLs?”
Well, here at Saucy Horse HQ we wonder about all sorts of things around optimising every aspect of our client’s digital marketing presence, and of course, blogs are one aspect of digital marketing that we spend a lot of time on – for the simple reason that they are one of the most effective ways of building online visibility and driving leads into your sales funnel. It follows, therefore, that we do indeed spend time on answering the question of how to optimise blog URLs most effectively, and today’s Saucy Horse blog has a few easy to understand tips on what you should be doing.
Blog SEO
It makes sense that you optimise every aspect of your blog SEO – and the URLs are one very important part of that process.
Tip 1:
Optimise your blog URLs for your readers as well as the search engines.
– Remove any words in the URL slug that are not key to the meaning of the page. Words such as “and” or “that” should be removed – they’re not needed for sense and there is no need for them to be there for the search engine optimisation. They don’t affect the meaning.
So, for instance, for this blog’s URL we are using the slug : how-to-optimise-blog-urls/ – this is what you see in the browser bar when you’ve arrived at the article.
I removed the second part of the title so that the URL concentrates solely on my keyword longtail – the phrase that I want to optimise the blog for and for which I want to rank in terms of search – ‘how to optimise blog URLs’
The important thing is that the URL is legible to your target audience – and for most of us that’s humans! A reader who finds this URL elsewhere on the internet will know immediately what the article is about – that helps build trust and credibility around your website and improves the likelihood of a click-through from the link to the blog. In terms of Google’s algorithms, when that click is made, you need the visitor to stay on the page – that tells Google this is a good result for the search and so the circle is complete – but only if the URL matches the search, matches the content…
Tip 2 : Include your keywords
Search engines and humans learn about your page contents by reading the keywords in the URL. Include keywords in your URL slug, and make sure they echo the actual page content – of course you should also be using Headers (H1 & H2 etc) in your content to reinforce what your page is about if you are fully optimising your business blog SEO, but the first thing your potential reader sees is your URL so make it easy on them!
User friendly URLs
Our big headline tip is to keep your URLs as user-friendly as possible.
When you see a URL like this
http://www.smithandjones.com/library/blog/2014/article 010205/#.U1gkIvldUrU
… your first reaction may well be to move onto the next result in the search. After all, all those numbers and symbols look suspiciously spammy, don’t they?
The reality may well be that it’s a perfectly safe place to go – but you’ve made it difficult for the visitor to know that. How much more effective a user friendly URL with keywords flagging exactly what the article is about would be in terms of securing the click through.
If your readers and the search engines read the title in your URL, scan the content, and then find what they think they will find, you’re on the way to a sensible and effective SEO policy when it comes to blog URLs – and that approach can pretty much be applied to every aspect of your search engine optimisation!
