There is a very easy way to determine the URL for a piece of content on your website: Look at the URLs of similar high ranking content.

For example, to determine the URL of this guide you’re reading, you’d search Google for your focus keyword. In our case, “on page seo guide”:

Of the first 10 results, I can already see that three articles on competing domains have the same URL slug: “/on-page-seo/”

Other guides might have different slugs, but since this is the simplest and most frequently occurring in the top results, it’s a safe bet for our own guide and is what we’ve chosen.

In terms of URL structure: hub pages are generally linked to from the homepage and may appear in the navigation menu. Other articles on the site that link back to these hub pages will often be in the company’s blog.

So this hub page for thehoth.com/on-page-seo/ is linked to by a relevant sub-page on the blog: thehoth.com/blog/on-page-seo-tricks/

Here’s what an SEO-friendly URL should look like:

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The mark of an SEO-friendly URL is its keywords.

Including keywords in the title of your URL, in comparison with an “ugly” URL that contains things like numbers and symbols, can make the difference for ranking on search engines.

In fact, Google’s former head of search quality, Matt Cutts stated in an interview that keywords in URLs were an important part of ranking. But he also said that the most important keywords should be added near the front.

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According to Matt, the ideal length of an SEO-friendly URL is around 4-5 words, with the algorithm giving less weight to keywords added in after the 5th word.

In other words, keep your URLs short and sweet, and use keywords near the front.

There are also some things you want to do on the backend to help your URLs rank better.

This includes adding a robots.txt file (a file that tells search engine bots where to look for content), including mobile-friendly URLs in your sitemap, and adding canonical dates to your blog URLs.

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By optimizing your URLs, you not only tell users what your site content is about, but you’re telling search engines like Google how relevant and valuable your content is.

When bots scroll your site, they’ll be able to help you rank better based solely on your URL structure.

It’s a strategic but often overlooked element of SEO.