Table of contents
What a friendly URL is
A friendly URL or semantic URL is a type of URL optimized for SEO in order to facilitate its understandability and indexation by search engines and users. Specifically, these URLs tend to be short, understandable, and bounded by a keyword or keywords.
Why friendly URLs are important for SEO
Creating friendly URLs is one of the best SEO practices.
These are much easier for users to remember and, at the same time, make life easier for search engines, as they are able to recognize the keyword and associate the content with a query.
To summarize:
#1 - Friendly URLs improve user experience
Because they are easier for humans to understand, just by reading them you can get information about the content of the page, which usually translates into better click-through rates or CTR in the results listed by a search engine.
#2 - They are an enhancement for SEO ranking
Even though Google is very efficient when it comes to interpreting the content of a URL, it still gives importance to SEO-optimized URLs, as they make its job easier.
In other words, although they seem to have lost importance over time, nowadays optimized URLs are still a push for SEO ranking.
#3 - They facilitate obtaining links with semantic context
As Google points out, some users may link to your page using the page URL as anchor text, so if your URL contains relevant keywords, this provides search engines with more information about the page.
Example of Optimized URL
If you need an example of a friendly URL, with the slug optimized for search engines and users, here is one.
Compare: isocialweb.agency/servicio-seo/
With: isocialweb.agency/1465?
Or: isocialweb.agency/default/servicio-seo.html
Which of the three URLs would you choose to publish on your page? Most probably the first one.
The same thing happens with Google.
Tip: remember to separate the words with a hyphen in the middle “-” so that search engines understand that they are different words.
In conclusion:
Using SEO-optimized URLs will always help you to improve your position in search engines.
So it never hurts to use them in the slugs of your pages.
The easier we make life easier for the Google bot, the better it will treat us in the SERPs.
Links and recommended readings: