I just noticed some anecdotal evidence of the importance of your keywords being in your URL and your title. My daughter recently published a personal webpage with her name in both the URL and the Title. To help her get indexed, I put a link to it on my PR4 sitemap page. The anchor text I gave her in my link included her name. Well, she got indexed fine in a short time. So out of curiosity I did a search for her name (remember that it is in her URL and her title, as well as on my sitemap page). Interesting results! She came up #1 in Google for her name on her PR0 page. I was #2 in Google for her name on my PR4 page. My conclusion? — My PR was not as important to Google as her having the searched-for keyword in her URL and in her title.
Yep. I think google is doing its job here and assigning greater importance to words that appear in title, description, url etc over content that exists in the rest of the page. If your daughters name did not appear in the title (or url) but was in a heading tag than it may well have appeared underneath yours - but then that would begin to depend on page rank and other factors such as the topic of your site.
I put the most important keyword/phrase in my url, page title, headline, first sentence of copy and a few more times (but only if natural sounding) and in a link back to top of the page... main keyword or phrase is very important and relatively basic SEO
Right. And it's very important not to overlook the importance of keyword-rich anchor text in external links back to your site. By varying the anchor text in inbound links I've been able to get a couple of dozen relevant keywords to appear on Google's first page in search results.
Yep, both title and keywords-in-url is very important but depend on how competitive keyword it is. If you son named "john lennon" (just an example) so I think it's hard to get ranked well without link popularity.
I don't think that's because her name in url or title make it appears number one, maybe that's because your daughter's site is more relevant to the keyword, and yours is just a anchor text. If you search link popularity checker in google, you can find many urls and titles with the keyword rank in 2nd or 3rd page. But keyword in title and url will do help your SEO and rank in SERPs.
This is the case of a less competitive keyword... What about a more competitive keyword. Can a PR0 site top by just having a keyword in URL, Title and a better anchor text.
Question for the experts here: What is the proper format for putting a two word phrase into a URL, for search engine purposes? Option 1: http://www.domain.com/keyword/ Option 2: http://www.domain.com/key_word/ Premise Assumption: That people will always *always* type "key word" when they search Google. Point being - if your key search phrase is a 2 word phrase, and people always type it that way with a space, should one put an underscore in their URL or does it not matter? Resist the temptation to say it does not matter, unless you are 100% sure. Thanks!
Thank you! Anyone else concur? Here is a little more context: I have a domain name that is nondescript as far as my targeted keywords go. Very similar to Monster, or Google, or Yahoo, or Amazon. Unrelated to their content. So my idea is to make my first subdirectory my key word. Example: Instead of http://www.domain.com/nondescript/filename.php I would do: http://www.domain.com/keyphrase/filename.php Im hoping that this will at least help make up for the lack of keyphrase in the domain name. Agree or Disagree?
What you have discovered is an essential part of SEO for your website The SE's will always give a site a higher ranking for webpages where the main keyword of the page is both in the title tage of the page, the H1 tag of the page, and the URL of the page It is best to target one keyword or keyword phrase per page, and then have lots of different pages all targetting a different keyword or keyword phrase. you can do some research into the keywords and phrases people are typing in when searching for the type of content that is on your website, and then create new pages for each of these phrases where applicable
I to have tried that on the site www.jefflilly.com for the term muscle car restoration. I am listed on the 4th page in 4 days for it!
Id like to optimise my name, but unfortunately I share the same name with a ralley driver for subaru :S Makes optimisation pointless imho. ha.
Just to reaffirm what you said, you can prove it by google Invision Gaming. The top result is PR3, and the second result is a page with PR4. (both different domains) the only exception is the PR3 contains a hyphen.
I am sorry kalyse, but pr really means nothing to the serps. Lots of sites with a lower pr are in the top spot. It all depends how the site is optimized for that specific term. But to your actual question, a keyword in the URL doesn't really mean much. but having it as the first thing in your title is very very important!