What is the best URL structure for categories?

[underscorelive]

A client's site currently uses the URL structure:

www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname%

Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted.  However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this:

www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms

Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons.

So I'm left with a few options:

1. Remove the category from the URL
2. Flatten the category hierarchy
3. Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic.
4. Leave it as it is

What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!

[wissamdandan]

Or

5. Shorten the keywords in the url post ie

title: Some Post titles are quite long as they are long tail terms

url: /parent-category/child-category/post-titles-long/

[underscorelive]

Thanks Tom, yes it's Wordpress - I do manually edit the slug to take out stop words and irrelevant words but sometimes its just not enough.

If I use digital marketing as an example, I may end up having:

contentwhiz.com/content-marketing/keyword-optimisation/optimise-your-blog-posts-with-perfect-keywords

How long is too long? No idea!

I'll just Snapchat Rand and ask him...

p.s. (Sorry if contentwhiz is you!)

[tomhall90]

Hi there,

I'm assuming you're using Wordpress? I think having the categories in the URL is a must if you're trying to rank and the category is one of your keywords for your website.

Personally, if I was having trouble with long URL's for the longer post titles (e.g. How to gain 1000 genuine followers on twitter, quickly and free == domain.com/social-media-tutorials/twitter/How-to-gain-1000-genuine-followers-on-twitter-quickly-and-free") I would probably remove certain generic words from the URL that Google wouldn't even search for anyway, so that my URL structure would become: domain.com/social-media/twitter/how-to/gain-1000-genuine-followers-twitter-free or words to that effect.

You are able to change the URL of the post (within Wordpress) as you Publish your post (under the post title field).

Hope this is of some help!

Tom