Should You Put Keywords in Your URLs?
Mary Bowling | 23 April 2008 |
The answer is a resounding YES! If you want to know why, read on…
Your URL displays in the SERPs
If your URL shows a crazy long string of symbols and numbers, it doesn’t tell the reader much at all:
However, look at the URLs in these listings:
Just by looking at the URL, you can tell where they are and what they do. Sure, the context around them can do that as well. However, the URL gives us one more clue that the listing is about what we are looking for.
It Adds Relevance for the Search Engines
Just as keywords in the URL make a page more relevant for a human reader, it bolsters relevance for the Search Engines, too. If you’ve named a page www.emeraldislegolf.net/DiscGolf.html, like this one:
it is likely to be about disc golf on Emerald Isle.
It Makes It Easy to Organize Your Website
If your pages are named for what they are about (like disc golf above) it becomes very easy to organize your website in a logical way and to talk about your pages in a manner that’s clear to all. You have a disc golf page, a photo page, a youth golf page, etc and everyone can tell which is which. When these are coupled with emeraldislegolf in the domain name, it becomes even clearer what the website and its pages are about.
It was once considered a spammer’s trick to put keywords in a URL, but that has changed. Now, Google officially recommends it in their Webmaster Central Blog.
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April 23rd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
What weight if any does hyphenating keywords in the URL have on SEO?
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Hi Mike,
Google says that for the most part hyphenating is not necessary for them to tell which two or three words are run together in a URL. Here’s an except from their official Webmaster Central Blog written on January 22, 2008 by Michael Wyszomierski:
“Webmasters asked about the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in URLs. In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you’re providing Google a useful signal
for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not. Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time. Even without punctuation, there’s a good chance we’ll be able to figure out that bigleopard.html is about a “big leopard” and not a “bigle opard.” While using separators is a good practice, it’s likely unnecessary to place a high priority on changing your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes.”
Personally, I recommend avoiding underscores, as they are very difficult to discern when the URL is underlined as a link.
Thanks,
Mary
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
so if you use punctuation as separators, you’re providing Google a useful signal
April 24th, 2008 at 6:21 am
Thanks Mary. Keep up the good posting!
April 27th, 2008 at 1:24 am
I agree Mary makes a lot of sense to me.