When SEO began to gain attention as a valuable tool in online marketing, there were many techniques used to establish strong search engine positions that just don’t fly today. One example is how you build the links on your web site. An old SEO trick when optimizing your interior links was to create links with as many keywords as possible to make your links look that much more enticing to the SE crawlers.

Example: http://website.com/website-sevices/internet-marketing/seo-services.htm

The problem with this url is that in most cases, there is no content in the “website-services” and “internet-marketing” directories. Before the SE crawlers gained more sophistication, this was an accepted way of keyword stuffing. But not these days. If you want to create links like the example shown above, you want to have an “index” page with relevant information and links leading to other pages on your web site.   Now that we know SE crawlers only crawl three link levels deep, it would behoove you to make sure that the most important pages  on your web site are within the top three link levels.

If you have no plans to place index pages in those directories, then you may want your url to look like this:

Example: http://website.com/seo-services.htm

It’s straight to the point and gives that page a better chance of being crawled and indexed in a strong position. Now of course you want to optimize your web pages accordingly, but you have to make sure everything from the page URL to the content on the page gets the proper SEO attention it needs to qualify as worthy or being indexed strongly. By placing your most relevant web pages on your TLD (top level domain) and making sure the pages are easy to navigate, you can ensure that they will be indexed in as little as 24 hours after the crawlers visit your site.

There’s much more to SEO and online marketing than just proper and clean url’s, but this is a focal point that can make or break the position of your web site and it’s pages in the search engines. So consult with your in house SEO if you have one or make sure that you collaborate closely with your SEO agency to make sure that your url’s make sense.