The subject is up for much discussion: SEO friendly URLs. Should or shouldn’t I include the category? Should the URL be as short as possible or is there room for extras? Should it be stuffed with keywords or not?
In this post, I’ll explain our take at Yoast on SEO friendly URLs and try to elaborate a bit on why we think that is the best option for that link. First, let me tell you that an SEO friendly URL differs per type of website. In this article, I’ll discuss a few to show the differences. There are a few ground rules, but I strongly encourage you to keep the visitor in mind when setting up your URL structure.

Ground Rules for SEO Friendly URLs

• The main thing to keep in mind is that your URLs should be focused. Strip your URLs of stop words like ‘a’, ‘of’, ‘the’ etc. In 99% of the cases, these words add nothing of value to your URL. If possible, strip your URLs of  verbs as well. Words like ‘are’ or ‘have’ are not needed in your URL to make clear what the page is about.
• The length of your URL isn’t really a factor in this. We do recommend keeping your URLs as short as possible. It’s not that Google doesn’t like lengthy URLs, but shorter URLs are probably more focused. Keep in mind to use a logical structure in your URL, as Google bolds the keyword used in search, even in the URL:

• This snippet also shows length isn’t that much of an issue: Google will show what they think is important for that visitor. Keep in mind, meta titles and descriptions are cut off at 512 pixels, and so is your URL – as you can see above.
• Don’t use underscores, as these connect the words and make them into one. Dashes are preferred.

SEO Friendly URLs for Your Company Website

SEO Friendly URLs for Your Webshop

SEO Friendly URLs for Your Blog or News Site

• http://example.com/post-title/
  If your site as a whole has a strong coherence, you could consider focusing on the post title and the post title only to create an SEO friendly URL. The coherence will indicate the main topic of your website to Google, so no need to add that in the URL.
• http://example.com/category-name/post-title/
  If your website is a news website and you’re writing about different topics, adding the topic (for instance as a category name), will make even more clear what the page is about. It’s a bit similar as explained above at SEO friendly URLs for your store.
• http://example.com/mm/dd/yyyy/post-title/
  If your website features daily news and the news is related to a date, be sure to include that date in the URL as well. If someone is looking for the latest news on Apple’s products, the date in the URL will already show if the page is about this year’s iPhone or not. My recommendation: only use the date in the URL if the date matters.
• http://example.com/post-title/three-digit-ID/
  Google News’ technical guidelines clearly state: “To make sure we only crawl new articles, please make sure your URLs are unique with at least 3 digits, and are permanent.” If for some reason you don’t want to include the date in the URL of your news article, you could add an ID for the post as well to get this covered. Keep in mind that Google News is only for news that matters to the world, which doesn’t apply to most company news.