Question about Urls and SEO

I am working on the SEO for a client. She has done zero optimization on her website and that includes the urls. Many don't even make sense. The site is pretty popular anyway due to her big following, but not a lot from the search engines.

So my question is, how important is the url in SEO? Should I change the urls and do a redirect or is just doing the seo on each post enough?

 

Optimizing the url is a useful way to send signals to people and search engines about the nature of the content at the destination page. People read urls before clicking them, so it's better to make them readable.

Example:

• yourdomain.com/seo/optimizing-the-url/ [strong]
• yourdomain.com/index.php?=34649426=t423=?p=654 [less strong]

​

The structure of the url can impact the weight it gets in the search rankings. Web pages in the root folder tend to be considered of more importance.

Example:

• yourdomain.com/website-optimization [strong]
• yourdomain.com/marketing/seo/website-optimization [less strong]

​

You could optimize the individual posts to boost their chances in the search results; however, if you are going to change or remove a page that's already indexed in Google or linked to by other sites, using a 301 redirect from the old url to the new url is a more elegant solution.

Hermas

 

Good question,

In most cases, don't mess with success, if the site is already popular, even without being optimized, then you should have an easy go at improving it in search engines. There is nothing better than a site that is popular, so work on it from an SEO standpoint, and if you feel the URL is not ideal, then create a better one and simply redirect, SEO both, that is best strategy in my experience.

Success to all,

 

Thank you both very much! ;-)