URL Structure
Design clean, descriptive URLs that help users and search engines.
A good URL is short, readable, and describes the page. It appears in the SERP and is easy to share.
Best practices
- Use lowercase words separated by hyphens, not underscores.
- Include the primary keyword.
- Keep it short - drop filler words like and, the.
- Avoid dates and long ID strings when possible.
- Use a logical folder structure that mirrors your site.
Example
# Good
https://example.com/coffee/pour-over-guide
# Bad
https://example.com/index.php?id=8842&cat=3&ref=xy
https://example.com/Coffee/Pour_Over_Guide_FINAL_v2When to use it
- A developer migrates an e-commerce site from auto-generated ID-based URLs (/product?id=4821) to keyword-rich slugs (/shoes/trail-runner-pro/) to improve ranking signals.
- An international site uses language-prefixed URLs (/fr/chaussures-trail/) so Google can correctly identify and serve the right language version to each audience.
- A blog enforces lowercase, hyphenated URLs via a server-side redirect rule to prevent duplicate content from URL casing variations.
More examples
Clean URL vs messy URL comparison
Clean, keyword-rich URLs are easier for users to read, copy, and link to, and provide an additional relevance signal for the target keyword.
# Poor: dynamic parameters, no keywords, uppercase
https://example.com/index.php?cat=12&pid=4821&ref=HP
# Better: keyword-rich, lowercase, hyphen-separated, short path
https://example.com/shoes/trail-runner-pro/
# International: language in path prefix
https://example.com/fr/chaussures/trail-runner-pro/Nginx redirect: enforce lowercase URLs
Enforcing lowercase and consistent trailing-slash rules at the server level prevents duplicate content from URL casing and slash variations.
# nginx.conf — redirect uppercase URLs to lowercase canonical form
server {
# Rewrite any URL with uppercase letters to its lowercase equivalent
if ($uri != $uri_lower) {
return 301 $scheme://$host$uri_lower$is_args$args;
}
# Catch trailing slash inconsistency
rewrite ^([^.]*[^/])$ $1/ permanent;
}Slug generator in Python
A slug generator function normalises titles to lowercase, ASCII, hyphenated slugs — removing characters that would create crawl or duplicate-content issues.
python3 - << 'EOF'
import re, unicodedata
def make_slug(title: str) -> str:
"""Convert a page title to an SEO-friendly URL slug."""
slug = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', title.lower())
slug = slug.encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode('ascii')
slug = re.sub(r'[^a-z0-9\s-]', '', slug)
slug = re.sub(r'[\s-]+', '-', slug).strip('-')
return slug
titles = ["Trail Runner Pro 2024", "Best CRM Software & Tools", "FAQ: How to rank #1?"]
for t in titles:
print(f"{t!r:40} -> /{make_slug(t)}/")
EOF
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