Today we have a few pointers on optimizing search engine results and organizing categories within your site.

Best practices for search-friendly pages include keyword placement in URLs, and titling your site’s pages in ways that are friendly for both humans and search engines.

One topic per page.

If you have a variety products or services, devote at least one page per topic. You may have a page that outlines your products and services, but from there, link to individual and specific pages for each product or service. 

For example, imagine a website that sells all kinds of baseball bats. The page showcasing the general selection should have a URL along the lines of “yourwebsite.com/baseball-bats”.  From there, we find subcategories of baseball bats for children and baseball bats for adults. 

Provide Clean, Readable URLs (For Humans and Search Engines)

When a user selects baseball bats for adults, the URL should then read something along the lines of “yourwebsite.com/baseball-bats-for-adults”, and the ones for children? “yourwebsite.com/baseball-bats-for-children”, of course.

Skip the Fancy Characters

The only special characters to include in a URL are hyphens.  Hyphens act as spaces, separating words and allowing search engines to read a URL.  If instead the URL read “yourwebsite.com/baseballbatsforchildren”, a search engine crawler would view the URL as one long word. In that case, when a human searches for the term “baseball bats for children”, the above URL would not show up in search results.