The BitWorm SEO Blog

The most common reason to use a friendly URL for search engine optimization has to do with keywords the URL giving the page a boost for searches with those terms.  While that seems to be true,  there is an additional reason that I don’t see discussed often.  The Human Algorithm.

First, what’s a friendly URL?  Let’s look at an example:

http://www.bitworm.com/search/2008/long-tail-keywords/

vs.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050314-164653

If you search for something related to the “long tail”, saw those two in the search results, which would you click?  Why?  Your “human algorithm” probably decided the first one is more relevant than the second, even though both pages in reality have to do with the long tail of search.

I know, there is more to the search results than just the url.  The are:

1. The Title
2. The Description
3. The URL

The battle for search traffic is not about ranking well.  Really, it’s not!  It’s about ranking well AND getting people to click your listing.

Your best chance of getting a click, especially if you don’t rank #1 for a phrase, is to have all three items (title, description, url) targeted to trigger the human brain to see relevance to the search intent.

It’s the human algorithm.  

Just as a search engine makes split second judgements to decide which 10 pages out of a billion are most relevent to a query, the human algorithm takes those ten results and determines which page to click.  

For me, and I’m sure many other searchers as well, this process happens in a second or two.  In that short amount of time, I know I’m not reading every single word being returned, but my brain quickly scans for signals of relevance and quality to chooses a page to click.  Keywords in the URL is one of those signs of relevance.  

Your goal is to not only be at the top of the search engine algorithm, but the human algorithm as well.  Friendly URLs help with both.