URL

What is a URL?

Last modified: March 26, 2020

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A URL is the address of a webpage. It contains the domain (the www.mysite.com) and most times an extension that identifies the page. For example www.mysite.com/aboutus would be considered a URL.

The URL is a vital component for users on the internet as it defines what page the user wants to view. There are lots of things to consider when thinking about URLs. This includes:

Keeping It Simple

There are numerous reasons why you will want to keep URLs simple. Firstly, it reduces the chances that a user will make a typo when entering in your URL. In addition, it is easier to use on publications and marketing.

Keeping it simple does mean that you should limit the number of words used within a URL. For best results, ensure that there are fewer than five words in the URL. Don’t use five words on every page. This is unnecessary.

Use The Right Tags

One of the key aspects of URLs is that you use the right symbols and tags within the content to make it more search engine friendly. Search engines, for example, can’t separate words which are together. To separate words you can’t use a gap, instead you must use a dash (-). Do not use an underscore as this represents that the letters before and afterwards should be joined.

So, for instance, www.mysite.com/aboutus should read www.mysite.com/about-us.

Use Keywords

To get your page to rank on search engines it is important to make sure that it contains your page’s keyword. For instance, it should contain the keyword for a product/service. You can use services like Google Trends and other tools to find the best keywords to use on your URLs.

Changing URLs

If you want to change URLs, WordPress makes this easy. You just need to go to the page/post/product and make the change there (unless you want to change the login page). However, this can cause problems with users trying to access the page using the old URL. To avoid this, you need to use a redirect plugin that will automatically correct users who enter in the old page’s URL.

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