Domain and URL SEO Techniques – Using city, state, and street as an example

TweetDeveloping clean, search friendly domains and URLs is the first thing that you need to look at when developing a site from the ground up. I like to think of the process like it were a geo-specific site. As an example we’ll use Hartford, CT.

I would want my domain to be connecticut.com in this case. This represents our business, our top level domain. In the case you need to abbreviate, you want to make sure you abbreviation is clear and precise (eg: ct.com). Don’t try and come up with something crazy that only you can decipher (eg: cnnect.com). This is a domain not a vanity license plate. Take a look at this article about URL canonicalization (using www. vs not using it)

From there we’ll move to our city. This represents your business channel (if it’s appropriate to break it out and you have the content to populate it). We are looking for hartford.connecticut.com. This makes a clean, clear structure that shows we are looking at data within Hartford, for the State of Connecticut. Some examples may be manfuacturing.ourbusiness.com or research.ourbuisness.com. Only break out these subdomains if your business reflects the same structure and you have enough content to break out into separate entities. It may not make sense for you to do this, and you should take great caution in making this decision. Cross linking between all of your subdomains is also very important to keep your top level domain relevant for each. Search engines will not just pick up on it. More information can be found in this article about SEO and subdomains.

So now we are have our domain structure for a specific channel, hartford.connecticut.com, now it’s time to move on to the rest of the URL. You should be using keywords instead of ID’s or variables being passed. Sticking with the geo reference, now we are looking at http://hartford.connecticut.com/downtown – this is a nice clean structure that is keyword rich. Depending on your sites content, this may be as far as you need to go. For extensive sites, you may have specific content pages that need to be broken down to an even more detailed level. In that case, we’ll do something like this: http://hartford.connecticut.com/downtown/old-main-street

If you can avoid filenames like index.php it results in a much cleaner experience. If developing in PHP, several frameworks can lend a hand in URL re-writing to make clean SEO friendly URLs. My favorite is the Kohana PHP Framework. Keeping a nice clean look for the end user and improve your chances of link backs.

In some cases you may not be able to easily avoid using extra parameters or other application ID’s in your URL, but if you can avoid it the extra time spent may just help improve your search rankings.

Key tips:

• Use a dash (-) instead of an underscore (_)in URLs
• Use keyword rich URLs
• Keep the length to 5 or 6 keywords

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