It’s been a long time since we covered one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO—the structure of domain names and URLs—and I think it’s high time to revisit. But, an important caveat before we begin: the optimal structures and practices I’ll be describing in the tips below are NOT absolutely critical on any/every page you create. This list should serve as an “it would be great if we could,” not an “if we don’t do things this way, the search engines will never rank us well.” Google and Bing have come a long way and can handle a lot of technical challenges, but as always in SEO, the easier we make things for them (and for users), the better the results tend to be.

Five of the fifteen are:

1. Whenever possible, use a single domain & subdomain
2. The more readable by human beings, the better
3. Keywords in URLs: still a good thing
4. Multiple URLs serving the same content? Canonicalize ’em!
5. Exclude dynamic parameters when possible

15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs