The Directory theme offers many settings to help you achieve the best SEO results and further customize your URLs. You will find each of the available settings below with our suggested use but you can of course use your own settings as the suggested use is only offered as a rough guide. Let’s first start with a quick explanation of what is the real purpose of these settings so you can efficiently use them for improving your directory’s search engine optimization.

The main benefit of adjusting the URL bases in your directory’s URLs is to help Google and other search engines know what your site is about form its URLs and this tool will help you do just that. Changing or removing the bases from any of your themes URLs can be done to all of them but not necessarily. Depending on your requirements, you could for example decide to remove or change the word ‘listing’ from all of the listing detail pages and keep the word ‘city’ the listing detail page.

The tool is there to offer you a great level of flexibility and depending on your SEO strategy and your site’s content, the ‘Customize Permalinks’ will work with you to achieve your targets.

One of the great ways of using the ‘Customize Permalinks’(Tevolution -> Custom Permalinks settings) tool would be to link your site’s URLs with the type of content your directory is about. The word ‘listing’ for example can easily be changed to something else such as ‘company’ if your directory is specifically publishing company listings. In case your directory was for restaurants, a good word to use instead of ‘listing’ might be ‘restaurant’ so every listing detail page has the word ‘restaurant’ in its URL and so on.
 

City Base In Category Pages

Enabling the name of the city in your listing categories URL will help getting the categories come up in the search results in relation to a city. This will prove invaluable when for example a particular city is searched for followed by a keyword containing the name of your category.

Including the name of the city in the listing category’s URL will also enhance the user experience and make navigating around your directory seem more logical and users will always be aware which city they are browsing.

Listing Categories Base

Depending on whether or not you can utilize the words ‘listingcategory’ in the URL by changing them to something else which might achive a more relevant URL to your directory’s niche, it’s advisable to remove this base.

In most cases you would want to remove this base from your directory’s URLs to help keep them nice and short which is better for your SEO in general. A good example of when you would want to keep this base for example is using it to add an additional search term to your URLs where you think your domain might be missing that term.

Listing Tags Base

Changing and keeping this particular base in your URLs might help the system get less confused as opposed to removing it. It’s more than likely listing tags will be the same as listing category terms and conflicts will occur if you remove it especially if the listing category base has been removed from the URLs as well.

It’s suggested you change it to a relevant but a short word to prefix the tags. It will be a good idea to choose a word that’s a synonym or an alternative to what your directory’s niche is about. Doing so will give your URLs an extra keyword you might not have otherwise been able to have appearing in the URLs.

Listing Base

Having the word ‘listing’ in the detail page URLs might not be a bad idea as it’s a keyword that’s often searched for on Google and other search engines. This of course is true if your directory is in the English language, otherwise change it to something else that would have the same effect in a language other than English.As with the other bases above, you could keep but change the word ‘listing’ to gain an extra search keyword in your URLs where you might not be able to include in your domain name for example.

Author Base

This is a great one to utilize as an extra boost to your directory’s SEO and shouldn’t be left on its default wording. Although author pages will generally hold very little SEO juice when it comes to content, choosing a relevant word instead of ‘author’ might just help you grab an extra keyword with your pages in the search results.
Depending on what your directory’s niche or targeted location is, using something such as ‘travelcompany’ or ‘travelcompanyuk’ in the case if it was a travel directory for the UK would give these pages a fighting chance in the results.
Change City Base

The word ‘city’ will be included in the URLs of all the listing detail pages and direct city links and it can not be removed. Changing the word ‘city’ to something that’s more relevant to your niche, location structure or the targeted location (if applicable) might be helpful to your SEO.

The option of being able to change this base is particularly useful to directories that are running in languages other than English. The above changes woud also work in other angauges so consider which word in another language would be most helpful to your directory’s SEO.