Keywords in URL

Posted by admin on August 21st, 2008

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I was very curious to know if Keywords in URL would make any difference to your Search Engine Rankings. After a lot of research in various Webmaster Discussion Forums I found that some disagree, but most of them have noticed that Google (Yahoo & MSN too) gives the site a boost, if keywords were a part of the domain name or URL.

Then I went on to try Keyword Inclusion for iwebie.com for different posts and it worked very well compared to most other listed sites. This could be based on various other factors though.

Keywords Occurence in a url may be hyphenated, underscored or conjoined. In 2005, Google’s Matt Cutts wrote and discussed about the underscores vs dashes (hyphens) issue concerning how the keywords must be separated within your URL’s. He concluded in this article that both hyphens as well as underscores would be considered as keyword delimiters in URL’s. After that major search engines like Yahoo & MSN followed the same strategy of not differentiating between the 2 URL forms.

Its a good practice to have your primary keywords as a part of your url.

The best way to include keywords in Wordpress Posts is by using a Custom Permalink . In your Blog Post, your Page Title would usually contain the most relevant and primary keywords for that page. So by using a Custom Permalink such as this we include some of the keywords in the URL which is good.

Keywords in Ecommerce Shopping Cart Domain URL’s

Most Ecommerce Solutions that you use to Create Online Stores are not SEO Friendly. There are so many inherent SEO Problems accompanying them. Since we are focusing on keywords in URL here, lets see what gets included in the URL part of these Shopping Carts. Some of these database driven Shopping carts contain session IDs in the URL in order to track visitors or maintain state information thereby making them not search engine friendly. Hence Search Engines will have trouble indexing your Product Pages as these product page url’s keep changing based on different queries or how you reach the page.

It is important to modify your Shopping cart software to have Search Engine Friendly URL Rewrites . One example would be to use the product title as a part of the URL where each space between the words of the product phrase would be separated by a hyphen.

Here’s a before and after example of a Typical Shopping Cart URL:

Before URL Rewrite:

http://www.host.com/webapp/sports/stores/servlet/StoreView?productId=10001&&langId=1

After URL Rewrite, it makes it a lot more SEO Friendly

http://www.host.com/Sports/cricket-kit

SitePoint itself has an article about URL rewriting with mod_rewrite:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/guide-url-rewriting

But again, Considering other Important factors of SEO, Keywords in domain names are a very small enhancement to your SERP’s.

Avoid : Over Stuffing your keywords in URL page file names / folder names as this could hurt your Rankings if the keywords are not a part of your Content.

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