11 Best Practices for URLs
Here’s a good idea to help both your human visitors as well as the search engines spiders. Your page’s URL (Uniform Resource Identifier) is your pages address. It’s what you link to or what your visitors can type directly into their address bar to get to your page.
It used to be that I didn’t give much thought to what I named my pages. Usually it was just some code for me to keep track of them when I was designing the site. It turns out there are some really good ideas as to what to name your pages, how long they should be and other things that will help both visitors and spiders find your pages easily and possibly help your search rankings as well.
It may not be easy to go back and to rename all of your old pages, but even if you can’t do that you can start now with any new pages that you add. I had someone who I respect once tell me that you can change content on your pages, but you should never delete a URL you never know how long it will take for someone to look for it. If that’s true you can always add new pages with duplicate content and good URL’s and leave the old ones there. No, I don’t believe that will penalize you with the search engines. It won’t help you, but it won’t hurt you either.
