Blogging Tips: Why You Should Use Hyphens Instead Of Underscores

Do you use hyphens or underscores in your website URLs? Do you know why it’s good to use hyphens in your website URLs instead of underscores?

If your business website is underperforming on major internet search engines, then that might mean your website will need some SEO audits.

With this, you will be able to understand what could be responsible for underperformance and determine where the problem is.

At times, your website might only require some simple SEO tips to improve its performance on search engines.

When you are making URL links on your website, there are certain things you should always do to help your website’s visibility on major search engines.

One of the things you should be doing is using hyphens instead of underscores.

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Why hyphens instead of underscores?

• 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 is less important.

So it’s best to organise 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 drill down” in Google Analytics to easily view data for all the pages in a given sub-folder.