Good practice with URLs

A brief summary of the importance of paying attention to URL design, drawing on:

• a conversation with a search engine engineer
• URL’s for Information Architects - Silver Oliver again!
• Well Designed URLs are beautiful – Mike Shenkel
• Google’s advice on URL structure to webmasters

Make URLs persistent

Because:

• Other sites link to them
• People bookmark them
• Search engines index them

The core content for a URL should be reasonably static (home and hub pages excluded of course)

Make URLs readable by humans

• They’re not just in web address bar
• People can remember them if they’re well designed
• People can understands them if they’re well designed
• They are more meaningful
• If they are well constructed they benefit search engine optimisation

Make URLs hackable

• They expose a logical structure to the site
• Supports navigation:
  • Help users orientate in the site
  • Let’s people move up the hierarchy
• Helps people guess the address of similar resources on the site
• So:
  • Label consistently
  • Put similar resources at the same level
  • Provide meaningful content at each level of the hierarchy