Page URL keywords
-
Hello everybody, I've read that it's important to put your keywords at the front of your page title, meta tag etc, but my question is about the page url. Say my target keywords are exotic, soap, natural, and organic. Will placing the keywords further behind the URL address affect the SEO ranking? If that's the case what's the first n number of words Google considers?
For example,
www.splendidshop.com/gift-set-organic-soap vs
www.splendidshop.com/organic-soap-gift-set
Will the first be any less effective than the second one simply because the keywords are placed behind?
-
ReferralCandy,
When optimizing your page for a set of keywords it's important to keep in mind that exact matches are most powerful. With that in mind, think about your customers and the order of the keywords they type into the search.
Are your customers more likely to google "gift set organic soap"
or
"oganic soap gift set"
In my opinion, the second one is more natural and probably a more common search query.
With that being said, the second URL makes most sense.
Hope this helps!
- Matt
-
Keywords in URLs definitely help your pages rank better for the keywords you are trying to target. The more precise your URL is to your keyword the better off you are. As long as your content is consistent and provides value there shouldn't be any issues with google.
-
Well, there is said to be correlation between having the keyword in the URL and higher rankings, if we are to believe the Searchmetrics ranking reports.
I don't the effect is going to be all that significant, but if you think about page titles and compare it to URLs: If you have a page title like Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Brand - it is said that the keyword at the front would receive the most weight. By the same logic, the earlier your keyword appears in the URL, the more weighting I imagine it would get. Similarly, if your keyword can appear in the URL as it does in the search term, as in for "organic soap" it would be /organic-soap, I guess it would be "stronger".
In all seriousness though, I can't see either of your options having any significant or influence or tangible effect; either would be fine. I understand that every little helps, but I wouldn't worry about this too much.
-
Yes, I would say the 2nd version gives you slightly better chances on good rankings. The usage of keywords in the title is more important though!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keywords in URL: sub-directory or single layer keywords?
Hi guys, im putting together a proposal for a new site and trying to figure out if it'd be better to (A) have a keyword split across multiple directories or duplicate keywords to have the keyword hyphenated? For example, for the topic of "Christmas decor" would you use; (A) - www.domain.com/Christmas/Decor (B) - www.domain.com/Christmas/Christmas-Decor in example B the phrase 'Christmas' is duplicated which looks a little spammy, but the key term "Christmas decor" is in the URL without being broken up by directories. which is stronger? Any advice welcome! Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JAR8971 -
What to do when your home page an index for a series of pages.
I have created an index stack. My home page is http://www.southernwhitewater.com The home page is the index itself and the 1st page http://www.southernwhitewater.com/nz-adventure-tours-whitewater-river-rafting-hunting-fishing My home page (if your look at it through moz bat for chrome bar} incorporates all the pages in the index. Is this Bad? I would prefer to index each page separately. As per my site index in the footer What is the best way to optimize all these pages individually and still have the customers arrive at the top to a picture. rel= canonical? Any help would be great!! http://www.southernwhitewater.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Same URLS different CMS and server set up. Page Authority now 1
We have moved a clients website over to a new CMS and onto a new server. The Domain and URLs on the main pages of the website are exactly the same so we did not do any 301 re directs. The overall Domain Authority of the site and the Page Authority of the Homepage, while having dropped a bit seem OK. However all the other pages now have a Pagerank of 1 I'm not exactly sure what the IT guys have done but there was some re routing on the server level applied. The move happened around the end of December 2014 And yes traffic has dropped significantly Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daracreative0 -
Google Page Speed Score 91, But 5-8 Seconds to Download URL
Greetings MOZ Community: In Google Analytics under "Site Speed" under "Behavior" our home page has a page speed rank of 91 which I assume is pretty fast. However the "Average Page Load Time" is varies between 5 and 8 seconds, which seems very slow. My developers have made major efforts to optimize the home page URL (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) for speed. The page has a carousel which I assume may be slowing it down. Is the download speed of this page detrimental to SEO? Or is the favorable Page Speed Score good enough. I am particularly concerned because the most competitive phrases are ranked on the home page. As it stands I am having a lot of difficulty ranking in the top ten for these pages. My concern is that the slow download speed of the home page could be holding back ranking of these terms. If necessary I can always redesign the home page and remove the carousel or reduce the number of listings in the carousel to speed it up. Is this worth investing effort in or is the speed good enough? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Does this work as a tactic for including keyword in URL structure
Howdy, I'm planning out a website and need to plan out the URL structure for best SEO value. Generally I would do something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive
site.com/widgetssite.com/widgets/large
site.com/widgets/large/blue
etc. I think this is a pretty straight forward SEO tactic. The issue I have with it is in terms of natural language the "thing" you are searching for in this case is a widget, so typically you would type/search [adjective] [noun], or in this case "large blue widgets." So one proposal I have is to instead append the "widget" to the end of the URL:
site.com/large-widgets
site.com/large/blue-widgets
site.com/large/blue/square-widgets
etc. Obviously this breaks the whole silo concept since the square-widgets page is inside the /blue directory but the blue widgets page isn't at /blue it is /blue-widgets. My solution is to setup 301 redirects from /blue to /blue-widgets (even thought there are no site links pointing to that page). Does this seem like a good idea? Or does this break the whole folder silo concept? What I like about it is that it feels more user friendly in terms of natural language and for certain high value keywords we can get certain pairings of words into the URL more like how a person would type them in.0 -
Optimize the category page or a content page?
Hi, We wish to start ranking on a specific keyword ("log house prices" in italian). We have two options on what pages we should optimize for this keyword: A long content page (1000+ words with images) Log houses category page, optimized for the keyword (we have 50+ houses on this page, together with a short price summary). I would think that we have better chances with ranking with option nr.2 , but then we can't use that page for ranking with a more short-tail keyword (like "log houses"). What would you suggest? Is there maybe a third option for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
Links to images on a page diluting page value?
We have been doing some testing with additional images on a page. For example, the page here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/2550/sukhoi-su-27-flanker-package-for-fsx/ Notice the images under the heading Images/Screenshots After adding these images, we noticed a ranking drop for that page (-27 places) in the SERPS. Could the large amount of images - in particular the links on the images (links to the larger versions) be causing it to dilute the value of the actual page? Any suggestions, advice or opinions will be much appreciated.0 -
Keyworded loaded subdirectory possibly diluting the page value?
Hey everyone, I have an ecommerce website which sells "Widgets" and is called "Widget.com" (exact match singular domain name) I have architect-ed my pages to be like this: www.widget.com/widgets/product-page.html I loaded in the plural (or in some instances a keyword variant) as a subdirectory before my products, and some of my category pages. Does this approach make sense anymore, or am I devaluing my pages ultimately by removing them from the root? thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SwissNinja0