There are many who think that there is no such thing as s SEO-friendly URL structure. Some professionals claim that search engines can easily make sense of URL of all types and any URL structure. As observed in most cases, it has been found that those who say so are web developers.   It will be no wrong to say that SEOs and web developers live in two different worlds. While SEOs care about what all can boost their ROI and website ranking, web developers mainly focus on site speed, crawlability and other technical aspects.

Reading farther you will learn what can be done to have an SEO-friendly URL structure of a website.

Consolidate non www and www domains

As a thumb rule, there are two versions of your chosen domain which have to be indexed in the search engines – non www and www version of it. It is important to know that these two can be easily consolidated in more than two ways. However, you will read about the most widely accepted practice.

Most SEOs make use of the 301 redirect to point one version of their website to the other or vice versa. Alternatively, for example, when you are not able to do a redirect, you can mention your chosen version in Google Webmaster Tools in Configuration >> Settings >> Preferred Domain.

 Close Off Inappropriate Pages with robots.txt

There might be some pages on our website that must be concealed from the search engines, for instance, pages with sensitive issues and terms and conditions pages among others. It is much better if these pages are not indexed because they do not have your primary chosen and targeted keywords and all they do is dilute the semantic whole of your website.

The robotx.txt file comprises of instructions for the search engines mentioning what pages should be ignored at the time of crawling. Such pages get no index attribute and also do not appear in the search results.

However, sometimes, unsavvy webmasters make use of no index on the pages where they should not be used. Thus, as and when you start doing an SEO of a website, make sure that no pages having no index should be in ranking attribute.

Avoid Relative and Dynamic URLs

On the basis of your CMS, content management system, the URLs it creates might be like the one mentioned below:

www.example.com/topic-name

or like this one:

www.example.com/?p=578544

It is important to keep in mind that search engines have no problem with either of the variants. However, it is still better to make use of static ones instead of dynamic URls. Static URLs have your keywords and are user-friendly since it becomes easy for one to know what exactly the page is all about by just having a look at the URL.

To sum up

If you have SEO-friendly URL structure, it means you have a URL structure that helps your website rank higher in the SERPs. From the web development perspective, architecture of your website might appear error-free and crystal free.