One of the areas that gets very little attention from webmasters with regard to their website's search engine optimisation is the URL structure. We put great efforts to tweak the content of the website to meet the keyword density of the webpage and we put in hours of work on building links for our website in an effort to get good search engine rankings. However, we forget that in order to get good rankings our website should be crawled well by the search engines. Search engines can be blocked from crawling your website completely by using poor URL structures.

These days many websites use content management systems for easy management of websites. Through these content management systems, we can create new web pages and when we create new pages through these content management systems, the URL of the page too is generated automatically and they will often be with special characters such as "&", "?", "=", "%", numbers, etc. When there are too many such parameters search engine spiders will not be able to crawl your pages successfully. Websites that are database driven too have such problems. This can undermine all the other SEO efforts that you have taken for your website.

Besides blocking the search engine spiders, URLs with too many parameters are difficult to remember. When a human visitor wants to visit one of your products pages, it would be easier to remember an URL that has the product name rather than dynamic URLs with too many special characters. You must avoid assigning numbers as a way of differentiating your web pages. It is not uncommon to see websites with URLs that read something like, www.yourdomain.com/index1, www.yourdomain.com/index2, etc. These are static URLs but they are not SEO friendly URLs. One of the best places to introduce your keywords is your URL and you must make sure that you select the appropriate keyword for each page and come up with descriptive URLs that can be easily crawled by the search engines.

If you want to make your URLs SEO friendly, then you must plan your website's architecture well in advance and come up with short URLs that will contain keywords that are relevant to each page without any unnecessary use of special characters. Human visitors will also easily remember such URLs. It is best when this is done during the design phase so that the entire site's navigation need not be reworked.