(Apologies in advance for this all in one query, but I thought this would be better than asking multiple separate questions right now... maybe we can make it a sticky! ) With the ever changing google engine and marketing, I would like to know the latest on what is the most advantageous as far as plain URL attributes are concerned..... here are my following cases: (if you can, please rate from 1-10 how important each case may be... i.e., strong content+great inbound links would be a 9 or 10... page layout being like 1 or 2) 1. Is ".com" still the best? Does google and yahoo really play favorites here? I have a bunch of good root names for .INFO and .PRO.... so whats more important, the root name or the extension? 2. Do hyphens/underscore help break up the keywords positively or negatively, if at all? 3. How important is the file names associated with anything that follows the root URL? 4. Is using multiple URL's for the same page, all keyword rich, bad or good? I.e., one of them would be the live site and all other would be either just forwarded or whatever other options there are for this concept. 5. Is it true that less than ~2500 words of content per web site can hurt? 6. Is embedded video from youtube the most effective single content component on a web page? So here are some real example... to simply, my keywords would be abc, 123, xyz... please if you can, rearrange them to go from best to worst.... I will do my best to put them in the order I think is best: abc-123-xyz.com/abc-123-xyz/abc-123-xyz.htm abc_123_xyz.com/abc_123_xyz/abc_123_xyz.htm abc123xyz.com/abc123xyz/abc123xyz.htm abc-123-xyz.com/index.htm abc-123-xyz.info/index.htm abc-123-xyz.pro/index.htm etc..... Thanks!
Here goes. Sorry I haven't rated them from 1 to 10 but I've tried to compare relevancy where possible: Inbound links don't carry much juice they just allow the spider and humans to find linked pages more easily. .com seems to be most important, followed by .co.uk and .net. .org also as a special kind of authority. .info is somewhat limited in scope. Hyphens beat underscores in page names. Straight joined domain names such as thedomain.com beat the-domain.com The filenames (page names) are very important as the the domain name. Title tags are extremely important. H1 headers are important but less so than title tags and certain websites have shown to rank very well without H1s. Multiple domains for the same page? Do you mean register another domain that you think someone will type in then 403 forwarding it or Doorway pages? There's nothing wrong in theory with Doorways but they have been abused in the past so Google penalises. Best not to use pages which just link out and your main page doesn't link into it. But there are differing opinions on this. I think it borders on the Blackhat. Less than 2500 per website? It depends on your competition. The bigger the better and older the better. If your competitor as deep linking content which keeps the user interested and coming back for more and you have a few pages then your SERP will probably be lower (obviously this depends on domain age and other factors). But don't just design 5 pages with 500 words each for example. More pages with less content is better. Think of it from the user's point of view. Research shows that users skim content so keep it concise and include lots of inner links. When you say video from YouTube do when mean as a Marketing aid or as opposed to embedded video or in contrast in text and sound? I'll answer all three anyway. Embedding from YouTube saves you bandwidth and kills two birds with one stone. You get the YouTube social media exposure as well as catering for those who want to watch video on your website. This, therefore, in my opinion is better than simply embedding. There are certain instances, especially with corporate websites where post a video on YouTube might be inappropriate. In terms of video, audio and text. It is best to cater for all three. Some people want to read text and watch video. Some people want just audio. Since autoplaying audio went out of favour in the late 90's and copious amount of annoying, inaccessible Flash at the turn of the century, the defacto standard as been to leave the user which the option to play video or audio using the YouTube style Play, Stop, etc icons rather than having them autoplay. Hope this helps, sorry it's too late for me to do the puzzles. Bedtime!
1. Is ".com" still the best? Does google and yahoo really play favorites here? I have a bunch of good root names for .INFO and .PRO.... so whats more important, the root name or the extension? Yes .com is still the best. It's more than importance in the search engines, it's also about credibility with the people checking out the links 2. Do hyphens/underscore help break up the keywords positively or negatively, if at all? Underscores are a big no. One or two hyphens is alright in most cases. 3. How important is the file names associated with anything that follows the root URL? The individual page names have a large effect on SEO. 4. Is using multiple URL's for the same page, all keyword rich, bad or good? I.e., one of them would be the live site and all other would be either just forwarded or whatever other options there are for this concept. I wouldn't bother with it. 5. Is it true that less than ~2500 words of content per web site can hurt? I've never heard anyone quote an entire website as having a certain amount of words. You need to be sure that each page of your entire site has a good amount of unique, relevant content in order to rank. 6. Is embedded video from youtube the most effective single content component on a web page? No, it can be a useful add-on.
Thanks guys! The only thing is, I understand and it is common practice to know everyone thinks .com is the strongest extension, but some SEO'ers say the extension doesnt matter at all to pure SEO unless you use a foreign extension like .kr or .jp or something for that country's purpose... in the end, it is just about humans' desire to click a .com still before anything else?
These response are most specific to Google (but also apply in some cases for the other engines): Google is TLD agnostic. The TLD doesn't effect your rankings... unless it's a country code TLD like .co.uk which does have an effect. But Google sees .com, .net, .org, etc. the same.. BUT users on the web DO see .com as the most legitimate type of web site for a business... They will likely see .org as best if they are seeking non-profit type sites and informational type sites. .info, .biz, etc. are seen as inferior by web users, and you'll likely have a harder time attracting natural links to these types of TLDs. Do NOT use hyphens in domain names if you can help it. You want people to be able to remember how to spell domains... you want them short.. and easy to type. Adding hyphens to a domain name makes it harder for people to spell & type and makes the domain longer. DO use hyphens as word separators in page and folder names... Pretty much all engines recognize hyphens as word sepearators. Not all see underscore as word separators... It was only a year or two ago that Google even started treating underscores as word separators. Googles Webmaster Guidelines suggest hyphens over underscore as well... Likely because there are STILL parts of Googles backend systems, algorithms, utilities, tools, etc. that still don't see underscore as a separator. You definitely want keyword rich URLs. They are a minor ranking factor for on-page SEO compared to other things like <title> and <h1> which carry far more weight... But in SEO it's all the little things that you do that add up to good rankings, never one BIG thing. So using keywords in page and folder names is important. If you can't bacause you are using some CMS that doesn't support search engine friendly URLs, it's not going to kill you... Having a keyword rich URL is not going to make a noticable diffence. An absolutely TERRIBLE idea. EVERY page on your site should have one and only one URL to refer to it... the canonical URL. The search engines rank URLs NOT pages... Each unique URL is seen as a different page. If you have multiple URLs for the same page then you create duplicate content and split page rank issues. Bad idea. VERY bad. I have never heard of any minimum word per site from any engine... Google likes sites with content... 2500 words is about 5-10 pages.. That is a VERY thin site... If it's an affiliate site, it had better add value to the site visitors. Google hates thin affiliate sites. Google "thin affiliate sites inurl:google.com" and check out the webmaster guidelines. Text is! Google and the other engines can't read images and can't read video... Dumping a video on you page is good for the users but doesn't do anything really for your rankings. It's a good idea to have a site with rich content like images and video to provide a better user experience. But text is what will get your pages to rank... If you're trying to rank for "abc", "xyz", "123" keywords individually then having all three in your domain name is likely no more helpful than having them in a page or folder name... In otherwords, if your targeted audience is going to be searching for "abc" alone it doesn't help that much to have a domain abcxyz123.com or abc-xyz-123.com. However, if "abc xyz 123" is your "money" keyword phrase (the most important keyword phrase for your site) and your domain is abcxyz123.com or abc-xyz-123.com (EXACT MATCH) this does help. Again, I would NOT use hyphens in the domain and I WOULD use hypens in the page and folder names on your site... Other than that I can't tell you how to organize abc xyz and 123 in the URL. I don't know the relationships between those keywords...
Huh? Where on earth did you find this little tidbit? Inbound links are the #1 thing that will make a page rank at ALL search engines. They are not JUST to drive traffic. I can make a blank page rank for any keywords phrase w/ enough inbound links... Oh wait... that could be the case at Bing maybe. How do you get .co.uk between .com and .net? .com and .net are likely the 2 best TLDs for Google.com followed closely by .org (which I agree has a more specialized conotation) ... Domains with .co.uk TLDs almost NEVER rank in Google.com. They are automatically assumed to be targetting Google.co.uk ONLY. Not sure why they are even in the comparison. .co.uk would be the #1 TLD to have if you want to rank in Google.co.uk but that is about it... It's worthless in any other Google index. 403 is a Permission Denied status code... when you try to browse a folder on a webserver to get a list of files but the server has been setup not to allow it. It has nothing to do with "forwarding" or "redirecting". I believe you meant 301 redirect.
Thanks a ton guys, excellent.... and yes maybe he meant 301 Canonical, but I still assume that even 301's are useless... I had someone else tell me that doing a 301 with other highly relevant URL's to your main site could help, even if marginally so...
Yes I did mean 301 redirect. I didn't put .co.uk between .com and .net I just mean that neither .co.uk or .net carry as much weight as .com. I was speaking from a UK point of view, .co.uk carries more location specific weight here than .com. I wasn't aware that the original posters query was aimed purely at Google.com? I meant inner linking not backlinking, anyone could setup inner linking page to page so it does not affect ranking significantly.
It is absolutely worthless from an SEO perspective to buy a domain with the keywords in it that you want to rank for and then 301 redirect it to your main domain. The new domain that has the keyword will have no inbound links... so the 301 does nothing for you from an SEO perspective... There is no PR to forward from the new domain to the old domain (other than the tiny little bit of PR that each new page on the web is given just for existing). Because the new domain has no inbound links, there is no link text to forward credit for from the new to the old domain. The only way it would help would be if you built links to the new domain... But why do that? You could spend that same time building those links directly to your old site.
Makes sense, and with all that u can do to improve your site, using time wisely is paramount factor... thanks! I'll be sure to be back here, and hope more questions are welcome!