We can’t stress this enough. A good site structure is a friend to both search engines and users alike, and can see traffic coming back to your site long into the future.
From an SEO point of view, we recommend putting a keyword into your blog URL (permalink if you’re using WordPress) whenever possible, as long it fits naturally and isn’t forced, to help indicate what your content is about to search engine spiders when they come to crawl your site. From a more personal point of view though, the easier your URL is to remember in the minds of your target market then the more likely it is that they’ll head straight to your site instead of searching for the competition.
If you can purchase a domain name that ties in with your brand somehow, is catchy and takes no time at all to enter into your browser’s address bar then you’re onto a winner. But what about deeper, more technical issues though, such as link building? If you have a large site for example, then you’ll probably have a lot of URLs pointing to a variety of different pages. What happens if one of those links becomes useless and leads to nothing?
Broken links such as these are frowned upon by search engine spiders, as it takes them to dead ends on your website. A 301 redirect can fix this problem though, which will help you when a search engine comes to index your website. But it’s important too from a usability point of view. It can be frustrating for people to click a link on your website expecting to be taken to a page, only to hit a wall in the form of a 404 error.
By keeping all of your links in check with full site SEO and fixing any broken ones whenever they appear is a positive course of action for both search engines and human traffic. The friendlier your internal linking, the more chance you have of gaining great rankings and generating more loyal traffic back to your site.
