Structure Your URLs for Greatest Global Impact

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies

235 оценки

University of California, Davis

Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies

235 оценки

Course 5 of 6 in the Specialization Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This course focuses on technical, mobile and social strategies for increasing site traffic. Learn how to build SEO for international audiences through content localization, global team alignment and optimizing for local search engines. Discover techniques to optimize mobile-friendly websites, get mobile apps discovered, and leverage social media to drive organic SEO traffic. You will also learn how to identify key SEO metrics and collect, interpret, validate, and report success to your clients and stakeholders.

From the lesson

Take Your Website Global

In this module, you will examine what you need to take your website global. You will prepare for global expansion and grasp tremendous opportunities to reach the world. You will be introduced to tested principles and best practices to optimize your website for global expansion. You will align your site with international audiences following guidance from search engines. You will explore how to structure URLs and employ localization to serve global customers, as well as develop engaging strategies to launch a global web marketing campaign. You will work with a budget for external or in-house localization teams and empower stakeholders to fulfill their roles in a global marketplace.

Introduction to Take Your Website Global2:20

Prepare Your Framework for Global Expansion9:08

Strategize to Grasp Global Opportunities8:48

Use Principles and Practices to Win on a Global Level7:13

Align with Search Engines’ Global Guidance8:57

Structure Your URLs for Greatest Global Impact5:35

Employ Localization to Best Serve Global Customers9:52

Engage Launch Strategies for Global Web Marketing9:50

Validate Global SEO and Empower Stakeholders for Global Roles6:20

Meet the Instructors

Dave Lloyd
Senior Manager, Global Search Marketing
Adobe Systems

Welcome back.

This lesson is on global site and URL structure.

The overall structure of your website and how you code your URLs is a key signal for

website performance.

In addition,

translation of this content is impactful in your website's overall design.

What you'll learn is how to understand the site structure and

URL structure required to have search engines see your content most effectively,

and you'll gain awareness of the options available to you as you set up global

URL naming conventions.

So ISO country and language codes, the way these work is they are two letters each.

Languages are two letters, countries are two letters, and

you join them together to represent a country-language pair.

In this case, Belgium French, Canada French, France French,

represent the country language patterns which differentiates

the Canada English or Canada French content that you might have.

This is a very established, well-understood and clear pattern for

enabling country and language alignment on your website.

Once you have an understanding of country and

language codes from the ISO naming convention,

you can begin to look at the variations on URL structure for how this is implemented.

Some of these examples show that there is really no standardization.

You can Incorporate country and

language in many different patterns on your website, and

it's really up to the governance of the website to determine the right pattern,

the right format, and the right consistency in order to put that in place.

Google's also provided guidance on this where they recommend you consider a URL

structure that makes it easy to geotarget parts of your site to different regions.

They ask for country specific, for example a .de or .fr.

A sub-domain against a .com for

example de.example.com.

Or a subdirectory, example.com/de.

All of these are equally acceptable, usually the reason for

them has less to do with search and more to do with

the governance or the protocol already set up within the CMS or the overall website.

But there are some clear pros and cons you want to take into account for

which kind of URL structure you establish.

Another common topic is translation of URLs.

My recommendation is to not translate URLs without justification.

Now from a pure SEO point of view

some have published that URL translation is a good idea.

My view is that's a narrow perspective and not an industry best practice.

Translation of URLs needs to be considered for the overall business impact,

and the cost to IT.

Not just whether it improves the SEO or user experience.

This explains to me why many companies opt not to translate URLs,

it's very hard to scale and maintain.

Plus there's many on page factors as we've heard and understood throughout

this whole course that impact rankings and translating the URL

should take a secondary priority to getting the user experience right overall.

Now I realize some will want to test translation of URLs.

So once you've accounted for the IT cost or the web production cost to maintain

them, what I would look at is click through rate from the search results

and any impact on long tail queries where I think you'll see the most impact.

By measuring the click through rate, you will be able to see at a very front end

whether a translated URL or an English URL,

all else being equal, have the same or different click through rates.

You also want to look at bounce rate, conversion purchase metrics,

if you're able to identify them.

URL naming conventions are challenging enough in English.

So I think it's important to really consider testing on a small scale.

Start with an AB test across just a few URLs if you can.

And then consider that you translate all other contents such as titles,

meta descriptions, and body copy as well.

In closing, in this lesson we've covered some basic,

but can be tricky concepts around site structure and

URLs with an understanding of the ISO country and language codes.

These can be challenging, somewhat political and

involved discussions if you work in a large corporation or enterprise when it

comes to global web business because there's no one right answer.

There are good practices and governance models, I think that need to be in place

in order to enforce whatever your company goes with but

you need to pick the one that makes the most sense for your web environment.

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