What You Need To Know When Choosing A URL For Your Article
- Authors Aflame
- Jul 26, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 20, 2019
By Heather Hart
Every article you write on your website will have its own unique permalink or URL (AKA, Uniform Resource Locator). The URL is the address where the article can be found on the internet. It usually starts with the domain name, followed by a slash, and then the article slug. When choosing a URL for your article, the slug is the part of the URL you have control over. Thus, the slug is the part of the URL this article will be focusing on.
When Choosing A URL…
Include Your Articles Keyword or Phrase
Choosing the correct URL is important to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Some website hosts allow you to choose your URL / permalink settings. For instance, WordPress offers the following choices:
💻 Plain -- yoururl.com/?p=123
💻 Day and Name -- yoururl.com/2019/04/27/sample-post/
💻 Month and Name -- yoururl.com/2019/04/sample-post/
💻 Numeric -- yoururl.com/archives/123
💻 Post Name -- yoururl.com/sample-post/
💻 Custom Structure -- yoururl.com_______ (fill in the blank, your post name will be used as a place holder until you update it).
Using the custom structure is the best option as you can update it with your focus keyword or phrase for each article. If you aren’t familiar with keywords and phrases, a keyword or phrase is what a user would type into a search bar to look for your content.
Remove Unnecessary Stop Words
Stop words are words like a, the, is, with, and, etc. These words can make your URL longer than necessary. SEO experts disagree on whether they help or hurt SEO.
A good rule of thumb is to only use them if they’re part of the main key phrase for the article you’re working on.
Use Hyphens To Separate Words
When writing out your URL slug, it will often be more than one word. The best practice for this is to separate these words with hyphens. If you use spaces, the space will be automatically filled with “%20”. This can make URLs hard to read.
Always Use Lowercase Letters
When choosing a URL, use lowercase letters. Some website hosts and internet servers pay attention to case sensitivity. Using upper and lowercase letters can cause issues for people who are trying to visit your site. They may have the correct URL but aren’t using an uppercase letter in the correct place so they can’t get through.
URLs Can Only Be Used Once
URLs can only be used once.
This is also a good rule of thumb for each key phrase. You shouldn’t continually write articles with the key phrase “homeschool resources.” Instead, you might do one post on that, then another on “free homeschool printables,” and one on “best homeschool planner.”
The corresponding URLs would be:
Yoururl.com/homeschool-resources
Yoururl.com/free-homeschool-printables
Yoururl.com/best-homeschool-planner
Those are unique URLs that use the key phrase.
Short URLs Are Better
When choosing a URL, it’s always a good idea to keep it as short as possible. Short URLs are easier to read and share.
To put numbers to it, URLs should be kept under 100 characters whenever possible and should never exceed 2,048 characters. Anything longer than that can cause loading issues.
Don’t Go Back & Change Old URLs
It can be tempting to go through your website updating all your old articles with new and improved links now that you’re armed with this information. However, if you do this, anyone linking to these posts will get a 404 error when they visit your website. This includes anyone visiting from the posts you’ve made on your own social media channels.
If you’re determined to go through and change links, there is a way to do it without losing traffic. To do this, go into your cPanel and create a 301 redirect from the old links to the new ones. Just make sure to keep track of all your old URLs before updating them to the new ones.
If you aren’t sure if you’ve found all of your broken links, you might check out the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It can crawl your site to check for 404 pages.
Changing URLs and creating broken links with 404 pages isn’t directly bad for SEO. However, when a reader lands on a 404 page, they are likely to quickly leave your website. This will increase your bounce rate, which is bad for SEO. Thus, indirectly, changing your URLs without redirecting the old links to new ones, will hurt your SEO in the long run.
Recap
Just to recap, when choosing your URLs, you should always use your keywords and keep them as short as possible, separating words with hyphens, and always using lowercase letters.
Remember, you can only use each URL one time, and changing a URL can cause broken links and hurt your SEO. With that said, you are ready to begin choosing a URL for your article.
Heather Hart — Author Coach
Heather has a passion for helping other writers make their dreams come true. With well over a dozen books in print, she has been working as an author coach for close to a decade.
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