SEF URL Basics

Owned by Kyle Sharrer
Sept 01, 2023
4 min read

This SOP is a work in progress. If you notice anything that is out of date, could be more clear or could be more efficient please update the SOP or add a comment to start a conversation.

Purpose

This document provides the implementation and reasoning behind the use of Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs.

Procedure

Read the following information to learn about the structure of URLs and their impact on both users and search engines.

Why Do We Need Optimized URLs?

User Experience

When creating an SEF (search engine friendly) URL you are creating another signal to let the user know what the page is about, as well as what page they are on.


For instance, when you look at SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) you typically will see the page title, description, and url when a page is being presented to you.

Looking at just the URL, you can see that it is:

 https://www.tastermade.com/articles/food-fight-red-vines-vs-twizzlers

Based solely on the URL, can you tell what this page is about? 

What about this URL?

www.buzzfeed.com/chrstinebyrne/how-to-grill-a-perfect-cheeseburger

These URLs give you an idea about the page’s subject matter due to the SEF portion of the structure.

What about this URL?

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes439031

The SEF portion only contains a list of random numbers that makes it difficult to identify what the page’s subject matter is about at a surface level.

Rankings

There are a lot of factors that Google and other search engines weigh when placing a webpage in SERPs. While SEF URLs are NOT a major ranking factor, utilizing them help benefit their readability to users.

Search engines value information on a site that’s organized and easy to understand, which makes it easier to index. When you are creating new pages, and you want to clump them together in a category you would do so by folders with similar items in it.

http://www.moz.com/blog/should-seos-care-about-internal-links-whiteboard-friday

The way a search engine would look at this URL would be, within the moz.com folder, there is a folder that holds all the blogs. Within the blog folder, there is a file called should-seos-care-about-internal-links-whiteboard-friday. Those components within that structure will aid search engines in their understanding of what the page’s subject matter is about and how it can relate to other search queries.

Clear Links

The third reason we want our URLs to be easy to read is for sharing purposes. Sometimes when we share links on social media, in email, newsletters, or elsewhere, we are not able to give them anchor text. When you have a URL that is structured in a way that is easy to understand it will often act like anchor text for the user. 

Review https://moz.com/learn/seo/url to see the examples and explanations they give for using readable text in the SEF portion of your URL.

How Do We Create SEF URLs?

Now that we have an idea as to why we are creating these URLs, let’s look at how we can structure them. 

We are going to be talking a little bit about SEO-Friendly URLs and Dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are typically generated by the CMS (Content Management System) that a website is built on, like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and our own Dealer Spike Platform. Typically when you are working with these platforms you can either use the platform to generate SEF URLs, or have it allow you to manually create them after they are initially generated. If this is not an option, you can use canonical tags to help create SEF URLs for dynamically created URLs. 

Review https://d2eeipcrcdle6.cloudfront.net/learn/seo/URLs-page/Anatomy-of-a-URL-cheat-sheet_170316_122433.png?mtime=20170316122435 to understand how a SEF URL is generated.

The part that we can affect comes after the top-level domain (TLD). Following along, the index is the name of the page or folder. When we look at that, we have to consider how would we rename it, and what would we rename it. If this particular page is about grapes, maybe the page name should be ‘grapes’. 

Next, .php is the file extension. That means that this particular page is written in php. Lastly is CGI (Common Gateway Interface) parameters. These are generated by the CMS to display pages, most often product pages. 

Warnings

When creating a new SEF URL, you must be sure that one does not already exist or you will be creating duplicate content—so make sure you check for existing SEF URLs.

When creating a new SEF URL you need to make sure that one does not already exist on your site. When this happens Google will crawl your site and see them as two different URLs, even if they go to the same pages. This can lead to duplicate content issues. 

Helpful Resources