Urls form one of the basic aspects of a site that affect both the usability of the site as well as SEO. The effects of a URL to a website can be divided into three major areas, which make them relevant to a person’s SEO efforts.

• Rankings- the urls provide a way of placing your preferred major keyword in the file path. This makes the keyword more prominent hence more relevant to your SEO efforts.
• Usability- an obvious URL usually helps the visitor to know what the page is all about even before opening the page. This will help in deciding whether the page is relevant or not.
• Click-through rate- a clear URL will obviously influence a visitor to click it. This is because he or she finds it relevant to the searched term.

How to include keywords in your URL’s
It is clear that placing keywords in your urls’ will make a difference to your SEO efforts. However, this does not mean that you have to stuff your URL’s with keywords only. This will actually prove detrimental. A better practice would be to ensure that the keywords in the file path occur in a natural manner. They should also make the URL easier to comprehend or even remember. Finally it’s also good to balance the URL’ length as a very short URL can be boring hence fatal for your SEO efforts.

Best SEO practices regarding URL’s
Apart from the keywords, there are other ways to make URL’s work for your SEO needs. The first thing is separating words on the file path. Using a dash is currently considered the best method. However, this might not be very necessary for Google, as the search engine has developed smart ways of identifying separate words. Other ways of separating the words include using a space. However, this has the disadvantage of less encoding of the URL and also makes it hard to share the URL in social bookmarking services. Using the & symbol is also another way of separating words. This method encodes the URL at %26 which makes the URL hard to read and also hard to share in some bookmarking services. Commas and periods have also been used to separate words but they have been constantly abused by spammers. Finally, there is the underscore. Although this was not normally considered a word, separator by many search engines this is slowly changing. It is therefore not a bad word separator.

Another important thing to note when it comes to SEO URL best practices, is the case. It is better to use lower case URL’s rather than duplicating in both cases. Once you have the URL’s in lower case, you can use the 301 status code to redirect to all the other URL versions. Finally, the URL extensions should also feature with regard to SEO optimization. This is because the extensions help the users to know whether it is actually a page or a subdirectory. Extensions can also include the date, which will help when searching for past information. However, you should understand that most people only search for current information.