While everyone agrees that a clean URL is important in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), I think it’s valued a lot less than it ought to be (in other words; it’s more important than most think). Whenever you search for certain keywords, those keywords are highlighted in the title, description & url of the search result pages.
The Title & Description speak for themselves. The title is what used to get the most attention, and the description may not mean a lot in SEO-points itself (content & semantics are they way to go), but its value is mostly to get users to click from the search result page, onto your webpage. It’s your entry-path. Your pursuading argument to win a visitor.
And that’s what the URL has been graduately evolving into. Nowadays, internet users tend to ignore the webpages’ title, and look at the URL in result pages.
Take the following search result for “dedicated servers".
While the title is displayed in a larger font than the URL, most people will look straight down at the URL to see if their keywords are present. Because after all, if the webpages’ filename contains our keywords, it’s bound to contain the info we’re looking for. Right? ;-)
It also has the advantage of getting a lot of information, in one tiny spot. The domain name usually contains the company title – which is often stuffed at the end of a webpage title, to contain more keywords. It usually indicates a language as well, so you know straight away what you’ll dive into.
Thus it’s important to change URLs such as
domain.com/index.php?module_id=4501&lang_id=501&product_id=2101
to
domain.com/en/productinfo/teddy-bear-slippers/
A clean URL, that shows what the page will contain, in a blink of an eye.
While the Title-tag remains a great asset to get good rankings, it’s no longer the deciding factor to get users to click through. It’s time to spend some time, personalising & keyword-izing (if that’s even a word) your URLs!