URL design is a crucial factor of your website design and the corresponding SEO processes that follow. It decides how your website address and directory structure is going to look like in the World Wide Web. Any flaw in the Internet address of your website will therefore take heavy toll on its overall performance.

A bad URL would mean your website would be lost in cyberspace and your target audience can never even find it, forget being visible in social media sites. And no matter how attractive your website design is or how efficient your SEO process are, a bad URL can hamper all their benefits.

Here are 10 most common mistakes that people tend to make while designing their URLs.

Session IDs
If ‘e9698ef2r7f923ab25e10bbb4164ba951’ doesn’t make any sense to you then it wouldn’t to neither search engine nor online users. Moreover, session ids are different for different users as per how their usage. Session ids don’t make any sense all in the website URLs and just serve to disseminate your online traffic.

Special Characters
URLs that carry special characters like apostrophes etc. cannot be submitted on a number of social media websites. This can severely hinder your Social Media Optimization process.

Numericals
Numbers in URLs are another major discrepancy. Though you make them to mark specific locations but it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to the users. Moreover, numercials in URL are also less appealing and fail to convey information.

Multiple URLs
Multiple URLs that point to the same homepage severely hamper the search engine credibility of the website. This is because Google indexes them as different domain names and divide the page rank among all of them.

Short URLs
In a bid to shorten the URLs of the web page, people often include just the date or a short scroll. However, even if it gets a bit lengthy, it’s always better to include the full title of the web page content in the keyword. Thus users will know what to expect are will be more likely to click through.

Date Inclusive URLs
No one really cares when you updated the content on the web page least of all online users. It’s not as if you are writing the current stories for a news magazine. Internet users would not click through URLs that have dates. They might as well go to the ones that are more descriptive.

Changing URLs post Publication
There is nothing worse that you can do than this. Defining a particular URL and then changing it after publication can lead to loss of visitors because users who try to click through from other social media website will encounter an error.

If you keep all these considerations in mind, you can avoid making these mistakes and be sure that your website URL is an ideal one. Here are some characteristics of an ideal URL. It should be:
• Clean and simple
• Human and machine readable
• Only one per page
• Devoid of special characters
• Use slashes
• Not have dates
• Should not be changed post publication

Maneet Puri is managing head of LeXolution IT Services, a frontrunner in the web design services industry. He leads his team of custom web designers to create powerful web solutions to his worldwide clients.