Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines.

Also, it can create easier, “friendlier” URLs for those that want to link to your content.

Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.Users would also have a hard time reciting the URL from memory or creating a link to it. Also, users may believe that a portion of the URL is unnecessary,especially if the URL shows many unrecognizable parameters. They might leave off a part.Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.

Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document’s title and snippet. Like the title and snippet, words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user’s query.

Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they’re quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site.

TIPS:

**Consider using punctuation in your URLs.

The URL http://www.somesite.com/look-here.html is much more useful to us than http://www.somesite.com/lookhere.html. Google recommends that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

**Consider using a robots.txt file to block Googlebot’s access to problematic URLs.

Typically, you should consider blocking dynamic URLs, such as URLs that generate search results, or URLs that can create infinite spaces, such as calendars. Using regular expressions in your robots.txt file can allow you to easily block large numbers of URLs.

**Wherever possible, avoid the use of session IDs in URLs.

Consider using cookies instead.

**Whenever possible, shorten URLs.

Try trimming unnecessary parameters.

**If your site has an infinite calendar, add a nofollow attribute to links

This will dynamically created future calendar pages.

A dynamically generated calendar might generate links to future and previous dates with no restrictions on start of end dates. For example:

http://www.somesite.com/calendar.php?d=13&m=8&y=2011

http://www.somesite.com/calendar/cgi?2008&month=jan

**Check your site for broken relative links.

Broken relative links can often cause infinite spaces. Most often, this problem arises because of repeated path elements. For example:

http://www.somesite.com/index.shtml/discuss/category/school/061121/html/interview/
  category/health/070223/html/category/business/070302/html/category/community/070413/html/FAQ.htm

**Use words in URLs

Use URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure. They are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.
Avoid:

• using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
• choosing generic page names like “page1.html”
• using excessive keywords like “baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseball-
cards.htm”

**Create a simple directory structure

Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and is easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.
Avoid:

• having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/
page.html”
• using directory names that have no relation to the content in them

**Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of  that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this.
Avoid:

• having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. “domain.com/
page.htm” and “sub.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content
• mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure
• using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and
remember them better)