Must-Knows about SEO Friendly URLs
Every merchant wants to get high rankings and be blessed with high traffic rates. Thus, search engine optimization is a complicated yet crucial task of every online shop owner. The important part in SEO is given to site URLs. They are like business cards representing your site address in search engines and helping visitors find your web store location. The appropriate structure of URLs will bring you desirable traffic results, while with non optimized URLs you risk to make SE fly into a rage.

In the following article you will find the information on:

  1. What are SEO Friendly and Non Friendly URLs
  2. How to Build Friendly URLs
  3. How to Enable Friendly URLs for the Shopping Carts:

SEO Friendly vs. Non Friendly URLs

Friendly or so-called, clean or static URLs are web page addresses that are readable for SE and convenient for humans. How do you know that the URL is friendly?

  • URL is easy to read and understand
Search engines can find folder names and distinguish links to keywords in the structure of URL. For users it is easy to remember clean URLs and type it into search engine string.
  • URL includes keywords
One of the factors the search engines use to rank site are the keywords in URLs. Use the appropriate keywords, however avoid overloading your URL.
  • Anchor text included in URL
If URL is pasted into a blog or other web page, it possesses optimized anchor text and users want to click on such link to be redirected to your site..

Non-friendly, dirty or dynamic URL in its turn can be distinguished by such peculiarities:

  • URL is long and difficult to read
Such type of URLs may contain information - a user ID, sort code, print code and many other parameters which can be regarded as duplicate content.
  • URL contains both parameter names and values
This additional information is not important for SE. On the contrary, it confuses search engines and causes them to miss possibly important information contained in the URL. .
  • URL is hard to remember
Because of complicated structure users can mistype URL and get to 404 page instead of your website page.

Tips to Make SEO URLs

It is advisable to implement the following changes to make your URLs SEO friendly

  • To increase usability and make URLs readable keep them concise
  • Use dashes rather than underscores as such structure is believed to rank higher
  • Avoid making URLs case sensitive, using lowercase letters instead of uppercase
  • Include general keywords in URL first and then move to specific ones

Shopping carts with advanced SEO features allow to enable SEO friendly URLs so you could get better SE rankings. Here are the instructions on how to do it for such popular eCommerce platforms as PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, CS-Cart.

Enable Friendly URLs for PrestaShop cart

  1. Login to your PrestaShop admin panel.
  2. Go to Preferences tab and click on SEO and URLs.
  3. Proceed down the page to the Set Up URLs.
  4. Enable Friendly URLs by checking the box Yes.
  5. Click Save button to apply changes.
  6. Next, you will have to regenerate .htaccess file. From your admin panel go to the tab Tools and choose Generators.
  7. Check the box next to Friendly URLs under .htaccess file generation. Then click Generate .htaccess file button.

Enable Friendly URLs for OpenCart platform

  1. Login to OpenCart admin panel
  2. Go to the menu System and choose Settings. Click Edit.
  3. Proceed to the Server tab.
  4. Select Yes next to the Use SEO URLs.
  5. Click Save button in the top right to save the changes.

You may also add SEO friendly tags to products and categories from the admin panel, in the tab Data.

Enable Friendly URLs for Magento shopping cart

  1. Login to Magento admin panel.
  2. Click on Configuration button and proceed to System menu.
  3. Select Web page in the left side panel.
  4. Go to the Search Engine Optimization tab.
  5. Confirm Use Web Server Rewrites (mark as Yes).
  6. Save config to apply the changes.

Enable Friendly URLs for CS-Cart platform

  1. Login to CS-Cart admin panel.
  2. Go to Add-ons menu and choose Manage Add-ons.
  3. Set the SEO add-no status to Active.

Note that SEO addon uses mod_rewrite Apache module which must be installed on the server. URLs can be modified from the SEO tab in the Addons section.

Now, that you know how to optimize your URLs and make them SEO friendly you can get higher search engine rankings and increase your traffic considerably. These tips will help you avoid SEO issues after store migration. What is more, Cart2Cart allows to migrate your products and categories SEO URLs. It is an additional option that can be chosen during migration setup.

  1. Login to your Cart2Cart account and start new migration
  2. Provide Source and Target shopping cart details
  3. On the step of Enities Selection in the section Additional Options check the box next to Migrate categories and products SEO URLs
  4. Proceed to the next migration steps

So, there is nothing complicated about it! It's high time to take care of your business development strategy. Choose the platform with advanced SEO settings and migrate your store to it with Cart2Cart. The data will be transferred accurately and securely, and after setting up friendly URLs on your new store you will enjoy rapid eCommerce development.