URLs are the “physical address” for websites on the internet, helping you navigate the billions of pages scattered all over this digital landscape.

Some links are pretty clear and concise, others are quite a bit longer and difficult to remember, and others still are jumbles of letters and characters that have no real meaning outside of machine language.

If you’re hoping to optimize your website (especially from a search engine optimization standpoint) you need to think long and hard about the kind of URLs you are creating.

What exactly is a URL, anyway?

As we just highlighted a moment ago, a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is basically the address for your website on the world wide web.

This is the address that you punch into a web browser to get you to your site or web platform, a link that includes your domain name and specific page names or designators that get your visitors to the exact content that they are looking for.

How important is URL like?

The length of a URL is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes time to optimize your website, not only from a search engine optimization standpoint but from a usability standpoint as well.

Longer URLs – particularly those that stretch beyond the available space in your web browser address bar – are going to be next to impossible for people to remember. This is especially true if your URLs use a complex structure.

Shorter URLs, especially those with descriptive and “punchy” words – and maybe only two or three words maximum – are effortless to remember and can also help you big time with your search engine optimization.

How long should a URL be?

At the end of the day, the major goal for every search engine is to provide the most relevant content to a user when they search for keywords on their platform.

When search engine spiders come to archive and analyze your website they are going to be looking for a handful of different key criteria, not the least of which is the length and descriptive text you’re using with all of your URLs.

Ideally, your domain name is going to be as relevant as possible to the content that you are sharing – but you’ll also want to make sure that your URLs are relevant, concise, and relatively short whenever possible.

As long as you are making an effort to shrink your URLs as much as possible (shooting for 75 characters max from start to finish) you should see a big bump in your search engine results as well as some serious improvements to overall usability with your visitors, too.