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Simple SEO Tips: Why You Should Use Hyphens Instead Of Underscores In Your Website URLs

Posted on the 07 April 2014 by Adeyemiadisa @adeyemiadisa
By Anthony Williams - April, 7th 2014
Post Highlights
*Simple SEO tips and tricks to improve website visibility
*Why hyphens or underscores in webside page URLs?
*Difference between hyphens and underscores in site URLs
*Content folders and website search engine visibility

If your business website is not performing as much as you will like on major internet search engines, then that might means your website will need some SEO audits to be able to determine where the problem is.

Do you use hyphens or underscores for your webside URLs? What do you have in your business website’s URLs? At times, your website might only require some simple SEO tips to improve its performance on the search engines.

When you are making URL links on your website, there are certain things you should always do to help your website visibility on major search engines. One of the stuff you should be doing is using hyphens instead of underscores.

Why using hyphens instead of underscores in your URLs is good?
  • Search engines see underscores as a character. This means that your keywords will be seen as a single long keyword, and you’ll lose any SEO benefit they could have incurred.
  • A hyphen, however, is seen as a space that separates words. Hyphens are better for SEO because they allow search engines to interpret your web page as relevant for more keyword phrases. That said, Wikipedia’s links have underscores, and they seem to be doing okay in search results
  • Also, people can’t see underscores in a URL when the link is underlined, as many links on the Web are. So hyphens are friendlier for people, and make your site more usable. So… example.com/adorable-kitten-pics is better than example.com/adorable_kitten_pics
Keep your contents less than 3 sub-folders deep

A sub-folder is a folder that is visible in a URL between two slashes. For example, in http://www.example.com/articles/name-of-page, articles is a sub-folder and name-of-page is an article in that sub-folder.

When it comes to sub-folders, search engines assume that content living many folders away from the root domain (like example.com) is less important. So it’s best to organize all of your important content so each URL has no more than two sub-folders.

Here’s another way to think about it: Make sure your URLs have 3 or fewer slashes (/) after the domain name. Here is an example URL that is a web page that is two sub-folders deep: http://www.example.com/articles/foo/page-name.htm

Using sub-folders allows you to use “content drilldown” in Google Analytics to easily view data for all the pages in a given sub-folder.