Improve blog SEO with short URLs

Search results may not be the be all and end all for good law blogs, but all things being equal you want your posts to be found when someone searches the subject on which you’ve written a post.

Raelene Wilson (@raewilsonwrites), a writer for WPMU.org, the leading source of WordPress news and information, writes that you can short urls will boost your search performance.

One of the easiest ways to improve your SEO is to think smarter before hitting “publish” on your posts. When the all-seeing Google indexes your website and decides which sites to prioritise over others, one of the factors it takes into consideration is your post’s URL, or permalink.

So it makes sense to summarize your content into an awesome URL. But how do you do that?

By keeping your URLs tight…

Wilson cites Google’s head of search, Matt Cutts on the importance of keeping your URLs short and sweet.

If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: ‘How does this look to a regular user?’ – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go” and check that out.

When you publish a post, the title becomes that portion of the URL which includes readable words called the slug. See the bold portion of the below URL for this post:

https://kevin.lexblog.com/2013/09/07/improve-blog-seo-with-short-urls

The slug is short (six words), descriptive, and includes keywords (Blog, SEO, URLs).

The title of your post will by default become the slug for your URL. Another reason, among many, that you want to keep your titles short.

You may modify your URL in the Permalink setting when drafting a post. See the below area which sits at the top of the page. I rarely, if ever modify the permalink. I try to use brief descriptive titles. Also note that gerrymandering urls can appear to Google that you are trying to game search, having the opposite effect you’re looking for.

Lawyers are notorious for long titles. It’s as if they’re afraid people won’t know what they’re writing about unless it’s explained in a sentence.

Forget it. Think the title to a manila file folder. How many words fit in the title area of the folder? What title could easily be found when filed in a metal file cabinet?

Good counsel from Raelene Wilson.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Villanova University Digital Library.