URLs are often ignored,treated whitout importance or even “ill-treated”, but the cruel truth it’s that the URLs are very important in optimizing a site.No matter if we talk about a more easy navigation on our blog or about some SEO advantages,the URLs are very important in our optimization.
So,in this post,we will discuss about usabillity problem and SEO problems that could be generated by URLs,how we can solve those problems.

1.The URL does not provide rapid informations about our blog ( usabillity )

Let’s take into account the following real URLs :

• mashable.com/2009/12/22/top-mobile-social-apps/
• traffikd.com/smm/not-working-2/
• quelle.at/enfinity/QuelleATShop/Mode-f-r-Damen/BEKsFFst1S4AAAERk8Fb1ynn/produktliste.html;pgid=Q_pQmIkoq14000E4dL0gI8QJ0000TFp4ukc5;sid=uwnBN_o-ixnBN7ENyffqYe6Sekso0zqzMR4=

Mashable’s link shows the date  that we will read a post about “Top mobile social apps” and the date that was posted,This are the most important informations that must be known from a link.

Taffikd tells us to guess if the subject is about social media marketing (smm), but we don’t know why the page it’s not working (not-working-2) so we must read the page to find out which is the problem.

Quelle’s URL does not offers too many informations about the page.You can read just a few word from his link,word like : shop, mode, damen, produktliste, but you can read those words just if you read  the URL carefully.Why we must make this effort to understant the main words from URL ? An URL must provide to us as many informations as possible.

In my opinion,at this category,Mashable have the best URL.You can see what is article about and the posting date.

2.The URL is too long (usabillity,SEO,branding)

It’s not very hard to notice that an long URL it’s hard to read,remember and share .Especially, bloggers, tend to transform the titles in URLs without taking into account the lenght of  URL. Here is a bad example,that must not be followed :

• copywriterunderground.com/2009/12/22/an-underground-update-the-copywriter-who-turned-niche-domination-into-lucrative-tv-and-product-development-deals/

Another sites (especially bussines sites) are using very long URLs because they want to include as many keywords as possible in thei URL,without taking into account the readers.

Try to forget about the readers and let’s talk about how it’s affected your position in SERPs and how the search engines are considering those URLs.

Asked about long URLs,Matt Cutts answered like this : “If you use 3,4 or 5 keywords in one URL it’s perfectly normal, but if the URL becomes too long,it’s beggining to look suspicios,may be considered as SPAM.Our algorithms are beggining to give less importance for those additional words[...]It’s not very well to include many keywords in your URL,there are a lot of places on your page where you can include your relevant keywords which can be helpfull for your readers and which are not included at “keyword stuffing”

3.The URL is not static (SEO and usabillity)

A logn time we’ve thought that the search engines have a problem with understanding the dynamic URLs,but those things had evolved and Google say that since 2008 some progresses had be made, but “the dynamic URLs have the disadvantage that different URLs can have the same content”,that means different pages with duplicate content.

Here appears a little disabillity in CTR(Click-Throught Rate) terms, users beeing more tempted to click on an URL that gives more informations.

4.The URL contains unnecessary folders (usabillity,SEO)

An optimized URL must not contains useless characters,words or folders (for users and for search engines).As you can see in example below,story şi 24161972 can be easly deleted because those words/folders are useless,they are not bringing any information.

• rollingstone.com/news/story/24161972/the_100_greatest_singers_of_all_time/print

5.The URL contains capitals (duplicate content)

The URLs are case sesitive,which may cause duplicate content problems.The users are tempted to link the version with lower case ,and this thing may affect the other page,considere main page.

It’s indicated to avoid using capitals in URLs ,because this way we will destroy our own page and we will lose this way all the links that normally are sent to our page.