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Use of Keywords in URL

Started By mindatrest , Mar 07 2013 13:49

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16 replies to this topic

#1 mindatrest

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 13:49

Hi All

Im finally getting to grips with my urls and am in the process of trying to shorten them. I have a couple of questions im hoping to get some feedback on.

1) Is putting keywords in a url good practice? I have read on seomoz that if the same keywords are used in url / title and description, that this can be detrimental to seo.

2) As I am using a content managment system which initially uses nodes as urls, I have corrected this by using url allias, however, no doubt this will create duplicate content in googles eyes, am I right in thinking that this can be resolved by altering the robots text to exclude the node urls when crawling.

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#2 Jason Dexter

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 13:54

1. Short answer, yes. You have to be careful not to spam the hell out of your website. It really helps with rankings and SEO to have keywords in the URL, but if you then spam the hell out of your website then you'll be in trouble. Take it steady, and you'll be fine.

2. There are a ton of ways to control this sort of problem. Preventing Google from crawling and indexing these pages might help. Maybe use rel=canonical to tell which page is "the" page. The first solution is if you don't want both pages to be indexed.

Director of Search Marketing for a digital agency in South Yorkshire | Freelance digital marketing consultant | Avid cat lover

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#3 DiederikEenschooten

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 13:55

@ Option 1 that is correct, atleast a friend of mine doest hosting and SEO and said the same thing to me. He sais that the

<head>

<title> Is one of the most important things</title>

</head>

But I am not sure though, but I put as much of usable key words in the title.

Also the <h1></h1> Are good for SEO (atleast thats what they told me

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#4 mindatrest

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 15:50

1. Short answer, yes. You have to be careful not to spam the hell out of your website. It really helps with rankings and SEO to have keywords in the URL, but if you then spam the hell out of your website then you'll be in trouble. Take it steady, and you'll be fine.

2. There are a ton of ways to control this sort of problem. Preventing Google from crawling and indexing these pages might help. Maybe use rel=canonical to tell which page is "the" page. The first solution is if you don't want both pages to be indexed.

Thanks for replys much appreciated.

Ive set up the urls as per advice, now gonna sort the canonical side of things as there are settings for this within the content managment module

It refers to :-

Canonical URL & Shortlink URL

I have set the canonical to [current-page:url:absolute] but im not really sure about the shortlink as it is set to [current-page:url:unaliased] by defailt?

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#5 Jheg

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 16:00

1. Short answer, yes. You have to be careful not to spam the hell out of your website. It really helps with rankings and SEO to have keywords in the URL, but if you then spam the hell out of your website then you'll be in trouble. Take it steady, and you'll be fine.

EMD's are a positive ranking factor right? but also having keywords in your overall url is a positive factor. Is the ranking factor of EMD's greater or less than keywords in the url for instance is

sitename.com/keyword better than keyword.com and does keyword.com/keyword beat them both?

Learning Ruby http://jheg.github.io/

ToDo App - www.gottodo.co.uk

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#6 mindatrest

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 16:08

sitename.com/keyword better than keyword.com and does keyword.com/keyword beat them both?

The problem for me is as my domain was purchased many years ago based on the concept of customer service, I only have the URL keyword route to go, Ive done it in a balanced fashion ie only put keywords in a URL that was relevant and avoided putting it in contact/news urls etc

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#7 Jason Dexter

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 16:39

Thanks for replys much appreciated.

Ive set up the urls as per advice, now gonna sort the canonical side of things as there are settings for this within the content managment module

It refers to :-

Canonical URL & Shortlink URL

I have set the canonical to [current-page:url:absolute] but im not really sure about the shortlink as it is set to [current-page:url:unaliased] by defailt?

Without having a look at your website, it's difficult to say because I cant visual the URL at the minute. The shortlink

EMD's are a positive ranking factor right? but also having keywords in your overall url is a positive factor. Is the ranking factor of EMD's greater or less than keywords in the url for instance is

sitename.com/keyword better than keyword.com and does keyword.com/keyword beat them both?

Good question. Lets try and use an example:

I have a website that is targeting blue socks. All types of blue socks.

dgdfgdfg.com/blue-socks would help me rank. But blue-socks.com would be so much better. It carries more weight.

However, what if someone is looking for blue knee high socks? Then blue-socks.com/knee-high would be the best route to go down.

You don't want to ever try and rank two pages for the same keyword. Ever. bluesocks.com/blue-socks is spammy, horrible and just no point. Further along the url structure it is, the less important it is. bluesocks.com/knee-high/socks/blue/type/blue-knee-high-socks wouldn't carry as much weight as bluesocks.com.

If that makes sense? EMD's aren't the holy grail, but certainly help you rank. That's why you could easily rank brand.com/blue-socks better than blue-socks.com

The problem for me is as my domain was purchased many years ago based on the concept of customer service, I only have the URL keyword route to go, Ive done it in a balanced fashion ie only put keywords in a URL that was relevant and avoided putting it in contact/news urls etc

Best way to do it. Don't fret that you didn't grab an EMD. Theres arguments that brand.com will always have a better click through rate than emd.com

Director of Search Marketing for a digital agency in South Yorkshire | Freelance digital marketing consultant | Avid cat lover

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#8 mindatrest

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 19:10

Best way to do it. Don't fret that you didn't grab an EMD. Theres arguments that brand.com will always have a better click through rate than emd.com

Thats good to know, I spose I have domain age on my side since its 12 years old.

I managed to sort out the urls and canonicals so all systems go.

Thanks again

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#9 Jheg

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Posted 07 March 2013 - 23:12

If that makes sense? EMD's aren't the holy grail, but certainly help you rank. That's why you could easily rank brand.com/blue-socks better than blue-socks.com

Makes perfect sense thanks

Theres arguments that brand.com will always have a better click through rate than emd.com

yeah I'm often suspicious when I see an EMD of how good the content will actually be which certainly backs up your comment about click throughs. It can almost look spammy at times and that's why I think in time it will have less weight in terms of seo. Would you agree with this Jason?

Learning Ruby http://jheg.github.io/

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#10 Rallport

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Posted 10 March 2013 - 14:03

With slugs I've personally always tried to:

Avoid stop words
Keep the number of woirds in the sluf to a minimum E.g. for "what are the benefits of shared hosting" I'd have my slug as "shared-hosting-benefits". Similarly, I hate CMS's that force the title of the post/article as the slug, as that usually results in a very spammy, long slug, that looks awful

Not sure how true it is, but I read a while ago on search engine land, that after seven words in your slug, that Google starts to devalue them.

Have personally always thought longer slugs defeat the whole point of slugs anyway - to create a short, easily memorable URL. So for the example, I'd evnd up with site.co.uk/article/shared-hosting-benefits as opposed to site.co.uk/article/what-are-the-benefits-of-shared-hosting

A Web Developer and semi pro Twitterer ...

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#11 MMedia

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Posted 10 March 2013 - 16:57

EMD's are a positive ranking factor right? but also having keywords in your overall url is a positive factor. Is the ranking factor of EMD's greater or less than keywords in the url for instance is

sitename.com/keyword better than keyword.com and does keyword.com/keyword beat them both?

You have to look at how Google serves the results to qualify this.

For example we're ranked 2nd in the UK for "Business Web Design" and "Business Website Design".

Our home page title contains that keyword and the url contains the word design.

We also have an internal page for /business-website-design which ranks 4 pages down.

So Google can see that our site is highly relevant to that term, but it ranks the TLD (brand) ahead of the internal page - even though the internal page actually has the higher relevance and also the higher number of "business web design" related backlinks.

For broad searches such as "business web design" Google likes to serve TLD where possible and uses the weight of internal pages to rank the TLD appropriately.

A longtail search however is much more likely to show internal pages that are a highly relevant.

So for longtail exact match URLs are strong, in fact you only had to do a few longtail searches to see this in the SERPs.

Google is getting good at weeding out the 'spam' exact match sites, via domain auth, backlinks and from the copy/content quality and volume.

Midas Media Full Service Design Agency | Midas Click - Digital Marketing Experts | Facebook | Twitter @Midas_UK | Google+

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#12 Jason Dexter

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Posted 10 March 2013 - 17:00

You have to look at how Google serves the results to qualify this.

For example we're ranked 2nd in the UK for "Business Web Design" and "Business Website Design".

Our home page title contains that keyword and the url contains the word design.

We also have an internal page for /business-website-design which ranks 4 pages down.

So Google can see that our site is highly relevant to that term, but it ranks the TLD (brand) ahead of the internal page - even though the internal page actually has the higher relevance and also the higher number of "business web design" related backlinks.

For broad searches such as "business web design" Google likes to serve TLD where possible and uses the weight of internal pages to rank the TLD appropriately.

A longtail search however is much more likely to show internal pages that are a highly relevant.

I'd say your homepage has a higher relevance. At the very least, it mentions the keyword more, hence ranking the home page as opposed to the internal page. Internal pages, automatically, have less weight than the TLD.

I partially agree to serving the TLD where possible, but it isn't to do with how broad the term is, but simply how strong the domain is overall and how relevant a page is. It's easier to rank a homepage than it is internal page BUT only by a fraction.

I could build perfect links to a page that has "Business web design" as the anchor, the page contains information about cars, but the hompage has business web design as the focus, then the homepage will rank. (Extreme example, and the website wouldn't rank anywhere near as well as it would with links to the right page). The internal page will rank for a little while until does a proper crawl of the website and realizes that it's not relevant.

It's how the link juice works and flows through the page, and how Google works.

One example I'll use is this one:

https://www.google.c...rch?q=help desk

The third website down is an internal page and shows that it's down to how relevant the page is. In your instance, Google has decided that the homepage is the most relevant in terms of authority, content and links.

Unless I've wildly missed the point! Ha

Director of Search Marketing for a digital agency in South Yorkshire | Freelance digital marketing consultant | Avid cat lover

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#13 Juc1

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11 posts

Posted 10 March 2013 - 19:36

2) As I am using a content managment system which initially uses nodes as urls, I have corrected this by using url allias, however, no doubt this will create duplicate content in googles eyes, am I right in thinking that this can be resolved by altering the robots text to exclude the node urls when crawling.

If you are talking about Drupal:

Does Google's "Duplicate Content Penalty" Harm Drupal Sites? No! Here's Why...

http://www.lullabot....content-and-you

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#14 mindatrest

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Posted 11 March 2013 - 09:14

If you are talking about Drupal:http://www.lullabot....content-and-you

very helpfull post thanks, just read the link and its good to know, I have it set it up correctly, ive used clean urls and also paths to set up allias, url's are much cleaner now and without over doing it are containing keywords.

One small problem however, Google is now indexed all of my old nodes which are returning 404 errors, Ive done my best to rectify this with google webmaster tools, i.e by submitting a new fetch request and sitemap, also requesting old url's be removed.

Webmaster tools report dns ok, robots txt ok etc but, re indexing seems to be taking some time, as I have no control over when google visits again im hoping in a couple of weeks it will settle down and google will catch up.

I hope ive only done some short term damage for a longer term gain :unsure: