[Design Agency Leeds]

Hi, we've written a brief guide on best practices for url structure to aid SEO and usability. Hope it might prove useful for somebody:

Best practices for url structure

[kirky_D]

Design Agency Leeds, on 08 October 2010 - 03:49 PM, said:

Hi, we've written a brief guide on best practices for url structure to aid SEO and usability. Hope it might prove useful for somebody:

Best practices for url structure

Good simple advice, thank you!

[DesignMyTemplate.com]

good one.

[danrcastro]

Simple and useful guide.
Thanks for sharing =)

[DJSelling]

Good stuff mate!

[Lev]

Well done.
+1

[rallport]

It is also important to note that hyphens (dashes) are preferred to  underscores as Google sees words separated by hyphens as individual  words – very useful for capturing multiple search terms.

Used to be the case 2 or 3 years ago. Dashes are preferred simply because they are more readable.

It is also important to use punctuation in URL’s to avoid long strings of characters that are difficult for humans to read. 

 So something like:
[b]http://www.example.com/new-microwave-ovens[/b]

 Is far superior to simply listing:
[b]http://www.example.com/newmicrowaveovens[/b]

Bit are fetched SEO URLs don't carry a huge amount of weight to start off. Also, Google is clever enough (and has been for years now) to recognize long strings. E.g. using you microwave example Google "newmicrowaveovens" - look at the title tag of the first result (Google UK) - "new microwave ovens".

Search engines do not crawl pages that are more than 2/3 levels deep as frequently as higher level pages

Absolute crud, sorry - bit too general If a deep page is well linked both internally and externally, Google will crawl it no problems. Additionally, Google will frequent and crawl deeper for a general well linked to site.

You keep it simple and use something like:
[b]http://www.example.com/products/microwave-ovens[/b]

You're talking about SEO urls and you've missed the point with your example. If the URL is about ovens why would you want the word 'products' to have more weight?

Sub-domains are a slightly grey area when it comes to SEO best practice.  They can confuse users and sow a seed of doubt as to whether the site is trustworthy.

Can you elaborate on that a bit - it's another example of you over generalizing I think