What is a friendly URL for Google and other search engines

A friendly URL or semantic URL is a URL that is easy to understand, both for search engines and for the user of the website and that shows the subject of the  page just by reading its address.

Which of these addresses seems friendlier to you?

1. 
   

Most people agree with the first option, right ? 

That cleaner and more organized address is called friendly URL, and implementing them on the website pages can help you a lot in your Digital Marketing strategy .

Continue reading to find out more !

What is URL

For those who are not familiar with this concept, it is worth talking beforehand about what a URL is.

That acronym, which means Uniform Resource Locator (or in Spanish Uniform Resource Locator), contains a virtual address. The URL of this post, for example, is:

A URL can lead to a website, a file, among others.

The structure of a URL is usually the following:

• A protocol, which can be http, https, among others.
• A domain, which in our case is www.rdstation.com
• A path, which in this post would be /blog/en
• And a resource —url-friendly
• 
  

What is a friendly URL

The friendly URL is a URL that is easier to understand, both for search engines and for whoever accesses the website.

For a URL to be considered friendly, we need to understand what this page is about just by looking at it.

This would be an example of a good URL

This other one does not make it clear what the page is about, passing an unprofessional idea. Most likely, you will end up driving the user away.

How to make a friendlier URL?

To make a URL more friendly, it is important to follow some good practices.

When separating words, for example, use hyphen (-) and not other punctuation marks, such as periods or _, since Google understands hyphen as a space, separating words appropriately.

Also prioritize lowercase letters, to make them visually cleaner, and do not use accents or characters that are not universal, such as the ñ (ñ).

For a URL to be friendly, it must also be as short as possible and always have the keyword related to that page. This helps both in SEO and in the user experience, to know if your page will address the topic they are looking for.

In wordpress, by default, whenever a website is created, the URLs follow the same model.

That can be easily changed, just go to Settings > Permalinks in the left panel menu. You will arrive at this screen.

 

There are different options. For the RD Station blog we chose the “Entry Name” option, as it is precisely the friendliest and shortest of all.

How to submit a URL to Google

Google allows you to submit the URL of your posts to be indexed more easily.

To do this, the first step is to go to Google Search Console, in URL Inspection:

In the search bar, just include the URL and search. This is where you can confirm if the URL is in Google and how it appears, as well as troubleshoot if it does not appear or appears incorrectly.

After sending the URL here, it is also possible to request indexing as shown in the image. 

In addition to requesting the indexing of the page, the tool also offers important information, such as the coverage status of Google coverage, mobile usability and AMP, and even allows you to perform a new test (Test published URL), to confirm if everything is correct. .

One tip is, before requesting indexing, test the URL and correct any problems.

Here at RD Station, we use this tool quite a bit and some pages have already been indexed in seconds.

To recap, a friendly or semantic URL helps both in SEO and in the user experience, making your pages easier to access.

In addition to this point, there are other techniques that can be applied so that your website has good results in search engines. We've packed it all into 28 actionable SEO tips to boost your website on Google . Download it and I wish you a lot of learning!

This post was originally written by Mônica Custodio  in Portuguese  and contains adaptations made by the author for the Latin American and Spanish markets.