Do We Really Need To Take Care Of Our URL Design?

Jul 10th, 2008 by Charles

Most of the small website owners take very good care of their url designs. They are very particular about how their URL looks like because it has more or less something to do with the optimization for the search engines. Even if it is not for search engine optimization, the words in the url are friendly enough to let us know something about the contents of the website.

Have you forgotten to take care of your naming convention in your URL?
Everybody knows how to buy a good domain name. But there’s one particular group of people who have forgotten to give a good naming convention for their contents. This group of people are actually belonging to the million dollar clubs. Surprisingly, they are the ones who don’t really design their URLs. They are our famous websites such as Bloomberg.com, Inhabitat.com, PHP.net, and many others.

The Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites has taken my attention to see what the famous websites are. I only start to take notice of it by then. It has been a norm to me that most of the big companies are using unusual URLs in their websites. For example, CNet has a url which is so ugly. Nobody really takes notice of their URL except to see the information through their main website. The URL looks like this:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9985746-37.html?tag=cnetfd.mt

One look at the URL, we will never know what it is until we open this. Anyway, this was not built for us to have a peep of what it is before we start taking up the bandwidth of downloading the web information. It’s only for the internal website to reference. So we have to go to their website in order to see this link.

For Search Engine Optimization’s Sake?
Arguably, some may say this is for optimizing their web contents because the url naming carries some weight in the search terms. I also hear some who speaks of those who don’t use such naming convention and yet they are doing just as fine. Whatever it is, it is still good to do it if you can.

There are also search engine experts who do think that it is really important for search engine optimization because the search engine recognizes the importance of a search term if it appears in your url, title, h1, bold and even the repetition of those keywords.

Blog Is More Important To Use Naming Convention In URLs
I would like to think that a web structure such as a blog is very important to have naming convention. That’s because it acts as a permalink for us to reference to when we want to blog about other people’s blogs. It gives a very clear “page title” to the bloggers who wish to link us since it represents the correct permalink they are referring to.

In the past, we used to name our default wordpress url like this:

http://www.charleslau.com/?p=34

Then, we started to work out something like that:

http://www.charleslau.com/archives/2008/07/10/tell-me-more-about-you/

Then we started to cut short a little by:

http://www.charleslau.com/2008/07/10/tell-me-more-about-you/

Why not taking out the dates as well?

http://www.charleslau.com/tell-me-more-about-you/

Life has evolved through in as short as one year. And probably all of us are already using this optimized url today. All of us agree that this is the best naming convention for our blog. No additional distractions. Just between the domain name and the url we wish to tell the world.

The Birth Of Social Media Which Cancels All Our Learning Curve
Allow me to sidetrack a bit. Nowadays, we no longer talk about such tiny things like this because it is not just about search engines or even to tell the world about your url. Ever since the born of social media, blogs have become more visible than ever! Back in the past where we kept on learning new tricks to bring in the traffic. Today, you simply have to socialize around as much as you do in the outside world. The more sociable you are, the more likely you will succeed.