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.

1. Make Them Clean
2. Do NOT use special characters, except for hypens
3. Make URLs simple
4. Use a URL only once per page, have a URL per page
5. Use slashes “/” as real directories only
6. All URLs must be both human and machine readable
7. Numbers should be used sparingly
8. Unless pages are likely to have the same domain, do NOT use dates
9. Once you have set a domain structure (DS) keep it this way
10. 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!