Hi there! 👋

Today I'm sharing a note on how you can make your website URLs SEO-friendly.

Now, for the last week's news, Google added a new feature that you can use to report an indexing issue directly to their search team.

This is a good feature because many sites struggle with Google search indexing issues, and now at least, there's an option to escalate these issues to the Google search team.

Google is also bringing the power of BERT NLP to improve its Google Assistant conversations. BERT will help Google to recognize unique names, improve Assistant's skills for alarms/timer tasks, and more natural conversations overall.

Now, let's get to this week's SEO tip... 💥

One of the simplest ways to improve site overall SEO is to have SEO-friendly URLs.

According to Google: “A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans.”

So SEO-friendly URLs are URLs that are easy for both visitors and search engines to understand.

They are important for SEO because search engines use the webpage URL to understand what your content is all about.

Now to create SEO friendly URLs, you can follow these steps:

• Keep URLs focused
• Keep URLs short
• Keep URLs formatting consistent
• Use relevant keywords
• Avoid special characters
• Avoid numbers
• Separate words using hyphens

While short URLs are recommended, there's no hard limit on how long a URL should be ... short URLs are recommended because they're mostly more focused.

For example: our keyword is "keyword research," and the page title is "Step by step guide to do keyword research," then the SEO friendly URL structure will be:

https://yoursite.com/keyword-research/

Also, changing the URLs of existing posts/pages isn't a good idea as that can do more harm than good. So apply these recommendations to new posts and pages only.

Finally, you can refer to Google's URL structure guide if you to learn more about this.

• Google uses a technique called reconciliation to understand when content on the web belongs to the same author.
• So to establish author expertise, it’s best to link to a social media profile on an author page. The idea is to reconcile all signals to a central place, like a social media profile.
• If an author consistently links to their Twitter account, for example, then that will help Google recognize they’re the same entity behind multiple author pages.

• Starting around Friday, April 23rd or so, there seems to have been an unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm both on the web search results side and the local search results side.
• There is chatter in the SEO forums, coupled with the automated tracking tools picking up big changes; it does seem like we had some sort of unconfirmed update.

• The 2020 webspam report from Google said the company detected 40 billion pages of spam every day, which is up from 25 billion in 2019.
• Google has credited advancements in AI with having reduced sites with auto-generated and scraped content from showing up in its search results “by more than 80% compared to a couple of years ago,” the company said.
• While hacked spam was “still rampant in 2020,” Google said they improved “detection capability by more than 50%,” which resulted in the company removing most of the hacked spam from its search results.

• Informational keywords are queries that prospective customers make when they’re in earlier stages of the buying journey.
• And with 59% of shoppers using Google to research purchases they plan to make in-store or online, there is a lot of search demand out there.
• So a few types of informational keywords that you can use are: advice, benefit analysis, comparison, example and inspiration, image, instructional, interactive, question, and video keywords.

• This guide by Ahrefs shares everything about how search engines find, index, and rank content.

If you like this, please consider forwarding this to a friend, or share on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Until next week! :)

Saksham

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