URL structures

Writing guidance

Best practices for structuring URLs include:

• Keep URLs short, simple, relevant, readable, and accurate as possible.
  • An exception to "short" can be blog, news or article URLs. They can be a little longer to reflect the page's content.
    
    
• Use lowercase letters and hyphens to separate words.
  
  
• Choose one structure and stick to that structure; be consistent.
  
  
• Include 1 or 2 keywords.

Avoid using:

• Stop words — and, or, but, of, the, a, etc. They aren’t critical to include in the URL.
  
  
• Dates and numbers — this makes it harder to reuse the page later on and make it more timely. Future proof your URLs!
  
  
• Acronyms — unless part of a proper noun or widely recognized/searched for. The reason for this is that using acronyms can be easily misintepreted. Here are some examples to follow:
  • use “veterans-affairs” and not “va”
  • use “prior-authorization” and not “pa”
  • use “hsa” or “health-savings-account”; both are well-recognized
  • use “ppo” and not “preferred provider organization”
• Extensions, such as .html, .php or .aspx — it makes URLs longer, clunky and less user-friendly. This is something that will be addressed with web development after the launch to see if we can "hide" the .html extension from appearing in URLs.

SEO impact

There are 3 main benefits to optimizing URLs:

1. Improved user experience. Well-crafted URLs provide people and search engines an easy way to understand what the destination page is about. People are more inclined to click on a search result with a descriptive and readable URL.
   
   
2. Rankings. URLs are a minor ranking factor when determining relevance to a search query. And including keywords in a URL can also act as a ranking factor.
   
   
3. Links. Well-written URLs can serve as their own "anchor text" when copied and pasted as links in forums, blogs, social media, etc.

Character considerations

• There are no exact number of characters you should use for URLs, but generally the shorter the better.
  
  
• For solutions/services pages: Keep each URL slug limited to 1-3 words.
  
  
• For articles: Keep the URL slug limited to 3-5 words to reflect the page's content.
  
  
• If you have full URLs pushing 100+ characters, rewrite them to gain more value.

Free URL slug generator

To easily create the slug (the part of the URL that identifies a page), use Slugify:

• Paste the page's headline into the "Any ordinary string" field.
• Click "Go."
• Your page URL will automatically be created with lowercase letters separated by dashes. You just might need to tweak the URL by removing stop words.
• Here's an example:
  • Enter the headline and click "go": A better way to manage specialty costs
  • The result, with stop words removed: better-way-manage-specialty-costs