You keep hearing that ‘Search Engine Friend URLs‘ term, you don’t know what is it about ? Well, Search Engine Friendly URL is a well-formed path that contains a domain, appropriate keywords and a proper directory structure that is free of “dynamic parameters†that pass data, and it makes a big difference when it comes to getting your site placed higher in search results. Read More > http://www.webmasterstown.com/seo-friendly-urls-improves-your-search-ranking/
I forgot to mention that on a 'normal' site you can also use mod_rewrite to accomplish this so for instance you can have a page url that looks like this: mysite.com/my-keyword-rich-page that can then be converted to mysite.com/index.php?page_name=my-keyword-rich-page seamlessly in the background anyone that takes SEO seriously really needs to at least learn the basics of mod_rewrite ... yes it's sometimes painful to learn but well worth it.
When somebody search on the search engine for example on Google for some keywords as 'SEO friendly URLs' which one in your opinion will appear the first http://site.com/index.php?postid=456 or http://site.com/seo-friendly-urls/
It depends on how many links point to each. What the anchor text are, age of site the PR of sites linking to them.
Defo works but it's easier to do when you're designing a site rather than on a site that's been around for a while. Do some research on the Apache module "mod_rewrite" (there's a good thread on DP about it but I recommend buying a book and really doing your homework).
Besides all that I forgot to mention that on a 'normal' site you can also use mod_rewrite to accomplish this so for instance you can have a page url that looks like this: mysite.com/my-keyword-rich-page that can then be converted to mysite.com/index.php?page_name=my-keyword-rich-page seamlessly in the background anyone that takes SEO seriously really needs to at least learn the basics of mod_rewrite ... yes it's sometimes painful to learn but well worth it.
Ok assuming all other factors the same. I would doubt that putting keywords in the URL file structure will make a 'big difference' as you put it, because ultimately it is something the webmaster controls and thus is easily manipulated, so Google shouldn't take it as a strong indication. There are only 2 things that I have discovered to make "big differences" so far. That is: 1) Editing the title to include keywords. 2) One way links to your site containing the targeted keyword.
Some part is correct and the other one not, I believe that SEO friendly urls are taken seriously by Google however the webmaster controls it and Google would penalize every webmaster's website who abuses it, and I don't think there is someway to abuse it.
It sounds like you have done some objective research which I think is great since there's always a lot people on the topic of SEO who treat assumptions as fact. My own study hasn't been scientific but I've seen enough to know that your #1- keywords in the title- is extremely important. Your #2 above however is harder to study and quantify but I'm very curious about your opinion on incoming link text. A lot of links that we don't have control over are going to end up being our domain names or even worse, something like "click here." Do you think these still have a lot of value if they're from a good site? Let me try to quantify it with an example: Would you rather have 2 "click here" links from PR5 sites or 1 keyword rich link from a PR5 site? What I'm getting at is do you think the link text is all-important or is the incoming link itself the important thing and the keywords in the text just a relatively small bonus?
I'd go for the 1 keyword rich link hands down. In my opinion this bit is really really important, i.e: getting the anchor text to include your keyword. It's how I rank pretty much everything. If you want some way to quantitfy the effectiveness, get yourself SEO for firefox added on to firefox and do some searches on Google for any keyword you like. It will show you the number of links pointing to each site according to yahoo. What you'll find a lot of the time is that sites with LESS links are actually ranking higher than those with thousands. If you get yourself a copy of the free "SEO spyglass" from link-assistant and do a thourough link analysis on 2 sites. It will count up the number of links containing a particular keyword pointing to a site. More often than not you'll see the site with less links ranks higher because it has more links with the targeted anchor text. You can look at PR distrubution of links, domain age, all sorts of other stats and find nothing conclusive. But when you look at and count the number of targeted links you often see conclusive differences. One final note: DP is full of people who simply say what they think without having any sort of evidence to back themselves up, all they usually have is heresay or one example where they did well and take it as fact. If you want to find quality SEO's where people backup what they say with evidence I highly recommend checking out some blackhat forums. Syndk8.net is one of my favourites, people on their generally don't bullshit, because they are able to produce many thousands of links easily they can perform experiments that whitehats would find difficult to perform. I'm also subscribed to the following quality blogs SEO blackhat digeratimarketing.co.uk bluehatseo.com slightlyshadyseo dark seo programming To truly learn SEO you have to perform your own experiments, although given a bad name, black hat seo is really not much different to white, both are screwing the quality of search results. Just happens to be blackhat that often gets the better results and more conclusive evidence.
Keyword rich links are good and this is pretty common knowledge but I see you are promoting your website. But for instance many search terms for internet marketing info take you right here to DP who does not have search engine friendly URLs. I think it does effect the ranking but it is not weighed very heavy.