Hi, I have urls on my articles pages that are not stuffed with keywords. They just have an article id in them and that is it. I was just wondering, that if I stuff the url with the articles title where each white space is seperated by a "-" then would my rankings improve alot. Would it do alot to my rankings or would it not really be worth doing it. At the moment I am ranked rather well for these article pages. I have found that out of 1,600,000 google results, Ezinearticles article is ranked #1 and is stuffed with keywords in the url My site follows and is not stuffed with keywords in the url Articleworld.net then follows which is stuffed with keywords in the url So do you think that changing all of my urls so that they are stuff would do alot. If it will not do alot, then I guess it would be best to leave them they way it is, but I would like other peoples opinions first. Does Google and other major search engines give alot of ranking points to keywords in urls or do they only give a very little bit.
I don't really have too much to comment on other than, from my experience, some engines will penalize you pretty hardly for having the same keyword in H1 + Title + URL. It's just a trend I've noticed in Yahoo more than most. However, by doing this you're getting great rankings in MSN, so it's up to you if you believe that offsets it.
Thanks for the reply. Does anyone else have any advice? Because I already have some good rankings, do you think I should leave it be?
According to Jill Whelan, she said in one of her monthly newsletters that placing keywords in URLs are of little use. Just concentrate on your TITLE Tag, content and earning links. However, some argue SEO is a game of inches and every little bit helps. I find using urls which are descriptive helpful for me and the visitor. As they know what they are going to click on by looking at the URL, as opposed to some ID parameter Thats SEO 101.
nice pointers ewan, yeah title tag i say would be the most important and concentrating on earning links
The great thing about having the keywords in the url, is that when you get a link from someone the words that you want to rank for will usually be in the anchor text. Eg: Imagine I want my site to rank for the words 'Earn heaps with adsense'. If I have a site called www.earnheapswithadsense.com and I ask for a link, then the person giving the link will most likely include the words 'Earn heaps with adsense'. If my site is called 'MaxPower.com', then I am going to have to ask the person to put the words 'Earn heaps with adsense' in the anchor text - which they may or may not do.
That actually slipped my mind about the anchor text. Well, it is to late now as I am getting a good amount of traffic already and I don't want to start doing 301 redirects on every page of my site just so that I can have text in the urls.