Ok over the past few weeks I’ve been chatting to a few people about the make-up of a URL. From use of top-level domains to use of special characters in a domain. From these chats I’ve come up with my “top 10 rules for designing urls” list.

Make Them Clean

Do NOT use special characters, except for hypens

Make URLs simple

Use a URL only once per page, have a URL per page

Use slashes “/” as real directories only

All URLs must be both human and machine readable

Numbers should be used sparingly

Unless pages are likely to have the same domain, do NOT use dates

Once you have set a domain structure (DS) keep it this way

If you do change DS use 301 (moved permanently) redirects from old URLs DS

As well as this list it is important to remember:

Not to put a Session ID in a URL! – Search Engines don’t track them

Multiple domains .com .com/index.php can be removed via the canonical tag

Limit the parameters in a domain

Use keywords not numbers

Do Not Keyword Stuff

Finally, Keep It Simple Dummy!