How To Rank Highly With Proper URL Structure
You can design your website, or have a designer do it for you, and you can have a place to host that content, but launching a site without an SEO plan is ill-advised.
Use an SEO-friendly CMS from the start.
Having complicated URLs and multiple session IDs and parameters may prevent spiders from crawling your content. If the spiders can’t crawl your content, they cannot read your content to put you in their index, and if you’re not in the index, no query will bring up your website in the SERPs. By using hyphens or underscores, which are read as spaces, you can use keywords in your URLs. Many content management systems allow for page naming, or have add-on modules to allow for it, and all modern blogging software (WordPress, Typepad, MovableType) can create URLs based on blog titles.
The importance of having keywords in the URL is apparent. A page called “blue-apples.html” is not generally going to discuss Toyota Camry’s. The URL of a page is likely one factor in landing in the index after being spidered, and may have a direct effect on rankings. You can do a search like “allinurl: keywords site: competitor.com” to see if the keywords you would like to use are being used in your competitor’s websites. Chances are, they will appear. If not, you may have just found a competitive edge over your competitor, so long as you’ve done proper keyword research.
