The Basics of URL Optimization
Many public focus solely on the content on their site, rather than the actual structure of the site itself. When SEO and field experts talk in this area on-site optimization, their referring to more than just the articles themselves. On-page optimization consists of the title tag, meta tags, glue text, image tags and perhaps most importantly the URL of the page itself. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of a page is the address that one would see in the address bar of their internet browser. Most webmasters fail to realize the sheer power that URL optimization lonely can have on search engine rankings. The following in rank should help you know why and how URL optimization works.
Field Keywords and URL Optimization
One of the ways search engine optimization experts bring their sites to the top of the search engines with minimal efforts is by purchasing domains that contain keywords in them. These domains are extremely powerful, in that they will nearly guarantee you a high spot in the search engine result pages. For example, if you are targeting the dog training niche, then the site name: dogtraining.com would be ideal. Though, it is very unlikely that such a name will still be available for hold. It is though likely that the name germanshepherddogtraining.com will be available. While there are not as many public searching for this phrase, there is a certain amount of public that will type that in and come directly to your site. Many SEO experts will buy field names like this specifically to build a arrangement of sites that can dominate a niche.
Optimizing Page URLs
Once you have your main URL you can then start optimizing your page URLs, which are the web addresses of the pages on your site. The best way to optimize your page URLs for the search engines is to make sure your targeted keywords are in the URL of the page. For example, if your page is in this area training German Shepherd to sniff, then an optimal page URL would be germanshepherdogtraining.com/Training-German-Shepherd-to-Sniff. This would be the exact URL to target such a phrase, and you would be nearly guaranteed to go straight to the top of the search engine result pages for that phrase. Notice the main field does not contain dashes, while the page address contains dashes between the words. This is because search engines lend less credence to sites with dashes in their main field name, where as the page URL desires to have dashes to break the actual words. Since page URLs can be very long the search engines prefer to read the page URL with hyphens.
Setting up Your URLs to Contain the Post Name in WordPress
One of the best ways to optimize your pages is to have the page title be the same as the page URL. You can do this easily within WordPress by changing the permalink structure to “%postname%”. This will cause any post made to have the same URL as the post name. If you are targeting a specific event or date, then you could also use the “%postdate%” tag as well.
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