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,
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 asked for country specific for example.de
or.fr, a sub-domain against.com.
For example de.example.com or
a subdirectory example.com forward slash 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
string 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
the 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.
Starts 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 needs 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
