The Real Importance of Your Blog URL

Your URL is the first step of your online presence used for your branding in the market.

Kind of like thinking about naming your future children when you were younger, the idea of naming your blog and securing that URL is just as exciting.

You might find out your choice du jour is already taken, and then you start getting creative. You need a blog name that stands out, one that lets people know they’ve found exactly what they’re looking for.

However, most people don’t realise their URL is also a useful search engine optimisation (SEO) tool. SEO best practices are what help your blog get to the top of search engine rankings for the keywords and phrases you use.

All the major search engines do support the indexing of keyword rich URLs. A portion of the URL matching to the search query is always displayed in bold in the Google and Yahoo search engine results.

For example, if you blog about the weirdest vanity plates complete with people sending in photos, people might be Googling “funny personalised vanity plates,” “weird vanity plates” or “best vanity plates.” Having one of those key phrases in your URL can help improve your SEO ranking.

Other SEO Blog Connections

Your URL is just a tiny part of your SEO campaign. The overall content should also have natural SEO key phrases peppered throughout and headers, meta tags and inbound and outbound links as they count as SEO fodder. You might “just” be a blogger, but if you want to become well known and monetise your blog, you have to know SEO.

It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging about sliding table saws or the best pizza in the world. Know your key phrases and use them on every single blog. Keep tabs on where you stand and look at keyword phrases your competition uses. Even if you think you have a unique blog, you probably don’t — which is why you’re not ranked number one for every single key phrase.

Don’t Overspend

The absolute best URL is a “dot-com” for a blogger. You’ll be bombarded with offers to snatch up that dot-org, dot-nets or a dot-anything-else for an additional fee. The chances of your URL taking off and rivals picking up the leftovers are slim to none. Blogging is a labour of love for most people, in the beginning, so save your money where you can.

Some characteristics of the successful URLs are as follows:

1. Ideal URLs are short and straightforward. Shorter is always better.
2. Short web addresses are always top of the popularity charts as they are easy to remember, so the typing mistakes are least possible with short URLs.
3. A successful URL should be the descriptive one.
4. The URLs should be a preview of your products and services.
5. A URL easy to remember always performs better as compared to the complicated one.
6. A successful URL requires a bit creativity to combine with the unique feature of simplicity and descriptiveness to display it in the first encounter. For example, a URL after your name or your firm’s name, may not in the long run-be the best choice.