Today's question is, does the URL of your blog posts affect the ultimate rankings on
Google?
Hi, I'm Clarice Lin, the ROI Doctor who help small businesses get on Google and YouTube
page one.
Today's question is about, what should a URL for blog post be looking like?
If it affects the rankings on Google?
So first of all, the terminology for having a good URL in Google's perspective, that is
an SEO friendly URL.
An SEO friendly URL on your website, how would it look like?
In Google's eyes, an SEO friendly URL means that when they, their algorithm scans on your
website, they know immediately from your URL, what this topic is about.
And that brings on point number one, an important characteristic of your URL it should contain
the keywords inside.
Let's say, if you have a topic about Instagram marketing in 2021, so in your URL itself,
it should contain Instagram marketing, and it goes on to point number two, your URL needs
to be as short as possible, and Google likes it to be short.
And this is this reading resource over here that they have put, Google have explicitly
said that they want short looking URLs, a short URL would look ideally, between three
to five words, five words is probably the max as far as you should go, if you can keep
it to two words, that will be really, really good.
But if you can't, between three to five will be perfect.
And that goes on to point number three, Google wants your URL to contain only words, they
don't want any numbers inside your URL.
So in this case, for my blog article, Instagram marketing 2021, I shouldn't include 2021 within
my article itself, because Google doesn't like that.
And it's also not good for the long term.
Because let's say if I want to update my article for 2022, then I wouldn't be able to change
the URL itself.
Because when you change your URL, Google thinks that is a totally different blog post altogether.
And then if your blog post was originally on page one, you will lose your rankings immediately.
So you don't want to keep changing your URL.
So on the safe side, keep URL to only letters and keep it short, three to five words and
that goes on to point number four, you want to keep your casing to be all of lowercase,
don't want to have a mix of upper and lowercase, because in some instances, some servers would
think that when you have different casing, they might think it is a different website
altogether.
So you want to keep to all lowercase, so it's easier for people to remember, and you will
not confuse the location of your blog posts.
And points number five, you need to include hyphens to separate those words in your URL.
So in the example of my Instagram marketing, if I have this URL, I will put Instagram-marketing.
I wouldn't put Instagram marketing has one word because theoretically, in English, it's
two separate words.
So you want to have a delimiter that separates the words so people can understand straightaway.
If the words are all joined together without spaces, or any separator of any sort, it becomes
really confusing for people to read and interpret it.
So they can't see it straight away what the topic is about, they kind of have to insert
a separater in their head to decipher what long string of letters actually mean.
And Google has also explicitly stated here, I'm going to put this screenshot right here
that says that they prefer you to put in hyphens rather than underscore.
Keep it two hyphens, that's what Google wants.
Point number six, should you include the date of your blog posts with your URL?
Nope, most people make the mistake of doing that, because that's the default setting for
WordPress, mostly, that they include the date publish into their URL structure as well,
you don't really want to do that.
Because if you remember my point number two, Google wants your blog posts link to be as
short as possible.
So when you have all this date published, that's inside, it confuses Google, because
this is not useful information that will help them understand your blog content better.
It's not helping the user in any way.
So keep it short.
If you have dates published included in part of your URL, go back to your settings and
change it.
So you will only have your main domain, your website.com slash your three to five words
of your URL separated by hyphens.
And that goes on to my last point number seven.
So some people would have their website URL having your website.com slash they might have
a blog in between, or they might have other folders because that's how the website folders
are being arranged.
But you don't really want that as your ultimate URL of your blog post.
Because as I mentioned before, this is not useful information.
Google wants your URL to be as short as possible.
So if you have any of those folder names, like slash block, and then this URL.
Try to remove this blog, there is some settings that you can do.
I'll put some resource where you can adjust if you have a WordPress website.
This is how you can do it.
So these are the seven different attributes of how an SEO friendly URL look like.
I hope this was useful for you.
If you enjoyed this video, please give it a LIKE so more people can see it and subscribe
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and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye!