How Shold I Structure URLs for a Portfolio?

[formandfunctionagency]

Hi Moz Community,

My web design agency has a lot of different projects we showcase in the portfolio of our site, but I'm having trouble finding information on the best practices for how to structure the URLs for all of those portfolio pages. We have tons of projects that we've done in the same service category and even multiple projects we've done for the same company within that category.

For example, right now things look like:

www.rootdomain.com/portfolio/web-design/clientname which tends to get long, bulky and awkward, considering we do lots of projects in the web design category and might do a second project for the same company.

How should we differentiate the projects from a URL standpoint to avoid having all of the pages compete for the same keyword? Does it even matter, given that these portfolio showcases are primarily image-based anyways?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines. In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this

1. A decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your site.
2. A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content.

Site structure is only one aspect of SEO. All the different aspects of SEO, like content writing, keyword research and even technical SEO, have to do with site structure. All the different aspects are closely related to one another.

Keyword research
Proper keyword research will help you nd out what search terms are used by your audience. And this is of great importance. Optimizing for words that people don’t use, doesn’t make any sense. In order to perform your keyword research well, you’ll have to get inside the heads of your audience. So, for Example, you have a design agency and you need to research for a topic like Wordpress, Web Design, Woocommerce Design, Shopify and so on.

So let's take "Shopify Design" as the main topic, let's assume you have been developed a lot of project about it, and you want to rank your portfolio. In that case, you create a category page called "Shopify Design" and inside of it you can use subcategories like

• Furniture Stores
• Shoes Stores
• Boutique Stores
• Pet Stores

As your site grows, you might create duplicate tags and categories. When you have a category "Shopify Design", you shouldn’t have a tag page

The same goes for single or plural; an article shouldn’t be in the categories ‘shirt’ and ‘shirts’. One of those shouldn’t exist. Pick single or plural and stick with it for all your category and tag terms. Tags and categories are both examples of a taxonomy system. When used correctly, a good taxonomy system can boost your site’s SEO. The opposite is also true: when used wrongly, it’ll break things.

Why optimize your category pages?
There are two main reasons why you should focus on optimizing your category page:

1 Category archives are landing pages
Your category archives are more important than individual pages and posts. Those archives should be the rst result in the search engines. That means those archives are your most important landing pages. Thus, they should also provide the best user experience. The more likely your individual pages are to expire, the more this is true. In a shop your products might change, making your categories more important to optimize. Otherwise, you’d be optimizing pages that are going to be gone a few weeks/months later.

2 Categories prevent individual pages from competing
If you sell boxers and you optimize every product page, all those pages will compete for the term ‘boxers’. You should optimize them for their specific brand and model, and link them all to the ‘boxers’ category page. That way the category page can rank for ‘boxer’, while the product page can rank for more specific terms. This way, the category page prevents the individual pages from competing.

Categories are used to create large groups within your site. They bundle content that has a similar high-level topic. Products or blog posts on your site should fall into a category (a shop category or a blog category).

Tags on the other hand just group content on certain topics together. Tags are not hierarchical. You can see them as an index of your site. They’ll not necessarily fall into a category. They can apply to products, but to other site content as well.

In your case to be effective in your strategy you need to follow a herarqy

• Main Categorie ---> Shopify Design
• Sub Categorie ---> Furniture Stores
• Single Project  ---> Project X optimized for a long tail keyword

You can use the tag with a different approach
An example could be

• minimal desig
• typographic desig
• color full

I hope this info can help you.If my answer were useful don't forget to mark it as a good answer
Cheers