Optimal Ecommerce URL’s

URLs are one of the many factors that that contributes to the position of your site in search engines.

Each CMS/Eshop platform creates URLs according to its own rules.
Sometimes it is better to correct or optimize these rules so that the search engines can retrieve all the contents of our website.

URLs Guideline

There are some rules you can follow to get the best results from your URL’s.
URLs must be:

• Short
• Relevant
• Unique
• Understandable

Short

There is not a unique rule about this point but for sure you must avoid your url can seem spammy or packed with keywords.

Category and product name should be present inside your URL but if they are not very descriptive on their own, you may think to add additional keywords.
Think about if you have a product, a table lamp called “Illumia 4500”; your platform could generate an URL like this one:

www.your-site/illumination/illumia-4500/

Well, you can think it’s short but, is it really relevant and undertandable?
And what baout if your platform generate an URL like this one?

www.your-site/illumia-4500/

Relevant

URLs must be relevant with the content of your page using a few words to get this goal.

Understandable

Try to make each URL visually appealing to customers: they must read and understand at once.

Here a couple of example to summarize:

www.your-site/illumination/table-lamp-illumia-4500/

www.your-site/brass-table-lamp-illumia-4500/

Unique

It can be taken for granted but each page must have its unique URL to avoid that search engines could evaluate unique pages with non unique URL as spam.

URL Structure

Here some suggestions to get an optimal URL structure:

• Use lowercase alphanumeric characters only.
• Remove all special characters (exclamation points, apostrophes).
• Replace spaces and underscores with hyphens (-).
• Remove all encoding special characters (%20, %2C).