Hi guys, I have some questions regarding properly optimizing a url for a community blog site. The current url I have now is: /blog/#id/username/article-of-the-title note: bold = static terms My questions are: 1. Does the static keyword "blog" in the url carry any weight if for instance a user searches "the title blog" for instance? Or should it be removed since I already have "article of" in the URL that is appended to each title. 2. Does having the username have any benefit to SEO? Do users like seeing their username in the url? or does it matter? 3. If I switched the url convention to "/#id@username/article-of-the-title", will the @ have any issues in the search engines? 4. What is the best SEO url combination? (the #id must be used as an identifier) I hope to find some help regarding these questions and appreciate any help in advance. Hopefully, this thread can help others as well. Thank you
Anytime a user searches for a keyword phrase, if the words in the phrase also appear in the URL then it helps. Having the searched keywords in the URL is a minor ranking factor but every little bit helps. So yes... If they search for "the title blog" then if words from "the title" and/or the word "blog" appear in the URL then it helps. Having the username in the URL would ONLY help the page rank for search phrases that include the Username... So if someone searched for "the title by <insert username>" then it would help. But the likelihood of that happening is slim to none... I'm not sure if it matters to users or not whether their name appears in the URL. Personally, I would NOT include it because it adds no SEO value to the URL and actually hurts by reducing the keyword density of other keywords/keyword phrases within the URL itself. I would NOT recommend using special characters like '@' in your URL nor would I recommend putting the CMSItemID at the begining of the URL (I wouldn't include it at all if possible... but if absolutely needed then it would be the LAST "keyword" in the URL. I'm not sure you've told us enough about your site yet for us to honestly give you recommendations. If it is truely a community, are you saying each user can have their own blog? Will they be allowed to have their own forum? own wikis? etc. Will the users be allowed to establish categories within their blog? etc. These types of questions should drive your information architecture. For example if YOU as the administrator are going to be the only one allowed to have a forum and wiki, but all users can have a blog then you might settle for something like: /forum/ (site's forum) /wiki/ (site's wiki) /blog/ (site's blog) /blog/user1s-blog-title/ (user1's blog title) /blog/user2s-blog-title/ (user2's blog title) /blog/user3s-blog-title/ (user3's blog title) etc. In the above example, if each user can have their own blog I would allow them to pick a unique name for their blog - a name that describes the topic of their blog... not just their username. This will provide your site with much more keyword rich URLs. In the above example if each user can specifiy categories you should encourage them to use keyword rich categories... I would make the URL of the category for user1 be "/user1s-blog-title/name-of-category1/". I would make the URL of post1 within category1 for user1 be "/user1s-blog-title/name-of-category1/title-of-post1/" If you insist on using the CMSItemID of the post as part of the URL then I would make it appear LAST in the URL like "/user1s-blog-title/name-of-category1/title-of-post1-CMSItemID/" because it is least important AND the most long tail "keyword" in the URL. So you end up with: /user1s-blog-title/ (high level topic of blog - head term) /user1s-blog-title/name-of-category1/ (sub-topic of blog - longer tail term) /user1s-blog-title/name-of-category1/title-of-post1/ (post of blog - longest tail term) or /user1s-blog-title/name-of-category1/title-of-post1-CMSItemID/ (post of blog - longest tail term) I often apply to individual HTML elements (<title>, <h1>, <h2>, ...,<h6>), HTML attibutes (alt=), and URLs... the SAME rules that are generally accepted for the content of the page... 1) that having your targeted keywords near the begining of the piece of content in question (be it at the page level for content, within an HTML element, within the HTML alt attribute, or within the URL) helps your ranking. 2) that generally higher keyword density (be it at the page level for content, within an HTML elements, within the HTML alt attribute, or within the URL) helps your ranking as long as it doesn't get to the point of being spammy. But without knowing more info about the site it would be hard to say exactly which URL structure I would go with.