SEO URL Structure – Best Practices

Search Engine Optimization is something that I’m fairly new at. I know some of the basics – define your meta data using relevent keywords, descriptions, and then be sure to use those exact words at least three time in your content. Managing One-Page Websites for GoLocal247.com has given me much more experience working with SEO tools, tricks, and best practices.

This week I had an issue come up with a sales rep for GoLocal247 who wanted to use a domain name with more than 5 words, and using more than 40 characters. On top of this being too long for anyone remember easily, it has the potential to be ineffective as an online marketing tool. The product I manage (and GoLocal247.com sells) is referred to as a Splash page that is intended to give the customer’s business an extra Web presence aside from their primary Web site – if they have one. This particular rep wanted to use the longer url because the customer wanted “to capture as many key words in the name as possible,” and thus make it more visible to Google and other search engines. Sticking to my novice SEO guns, I did a little searching and found some great answers.

1. Think of 5 Great Keywords that describe your project or business, and pick the best combination
2. Being Unique is the key to great visibility. Just as in high school, dressing like the cool kids isn’t going to make you cool; having a domain name that’s too similar to a big-name brand or very popular Web site will only cause confusion for your human visitors, but also for the search engine bots and crawlers.
3. URLs should be easy to type. Try not to use hyphens or hard to spell words. This comes in handy if you are trying to build a brand because it helps the end-user remember the url and thus your brand much easier and/or faster.

These are just some of the things I relayed to the sales rep when thinking about his/her customer’s domain name. For more great tips and best practices to use when choosing a domain name check out SEOMoz.org and the Search Engine Journal.