Today I was posed with a question on URL structure, “is better to go with a short URL or a long URL?” Many websites/blogs have specific goals that they are trying to reach, and depending on your goals you can go with one option or the other.
###Short URL strings
Some of the common reasons on why people use short URLs are
1. They are easier to memorize.
2. They are easier for people to type it in the address bar.
###Long URL strings
In many cases people use long URL strings because they are trying to increase their search engine rankings. They stuff keywords within their URLs and the URLs are descriptive of each page. You may have noticed that when you do a search for a particular keyword on Google, they bold the URLs that contain that keyword.
I did a search for “seo” on Google and the word “seo” was bolded when it was found within the URL.
So what URL structure should you use? If you want your URLs to be usable you might want to go with a shorter URL and if you are looking to increase your rankings and stuff keywords into your URL (which I don’t recommend) then you can go with the long URL string. And if you were wondering what option I use with this blog, it’s neither. The URLs on this blog are automatically created based on the post title, and I feel that generally it is best to come up with something that provides a good balance between what is easiest for visitors and what is most related to the content of the webpage.
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