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
-
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
Domain.com/old-url to domain.com/new-url
HI, I have to change old url`s to new one, for the same domain and all landing pages will be the same: domain.com/old-url I have to change to: domain.com/new-url All together more than 70.000 url. What is best way to do that? should I use 301st redirect? is it possible to do in code or how? what could you please suggest? Thank you, Edgars
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edzjus3330 -
Should we use URL parameters or plain URL's=
Hi, Me and the development team are having a heated discussion about one of the more important thing in life, i.e. URL structures on our site. Let's say we are creating a AirBNB clone, and we want to be found when people search for apartments new york. As we have both have houses and apartments in all cities in the U.S it would make sense for our url to at least include these, so clone.com/Appartments/New-York but the user are also able to filter on price and size. This isn't really relevant for google, and we all agree on clone.com/Apartments/New-York should be canonical for all apartment/New York searches. But how should the url look like for people having a price for max 300$ and 100 sqft? clone.com/Apartments/New-York?price=30&size=100 or (We are using Node.js so no problem) clone.com/Apartments/New-York/Price/30/Size/100 The developers hate url parameters with a vengeance, and think the last version is the preferable one and most user readable, and says that as long we use canonical on everything to clone.com/Apartments/New-York it won't matter for god old google. I think the url parameters are the way to go for two reasons. One is that google might by themselves figure out that the price parameter doesn't matter (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en) and also it is possible in webmaster tools to actually tell google that you shouldn't worry about a parameter. We have agreed to disagree on this point, and let the wisdom of Moz decide what we ought to do. What do you all think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peekabo0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Duplicate URL home page
I just got a duplicate URL error on by SEOMOZ report - and I wonder if I should worry about it Assume my site is named www.widgets.com I'm getting duplicate url from http://www.widgets.com & http://www.widgets.com/ Do the search engines really see this as different on the home page? The general drift on the web is that You site should look like Home page = http://www.widgets.com And subpages http://www.widgets.com/widget1/ Of course it seems as though the IIS7 slash tool will rewrite everything Including the home page to a slash.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
Is there an optimal ratio of external links to a page vs internal links originating at that page ?
I understand that multiple links fro a site dilute link juice. I also understand that external links to a specific page with relevant anchortext helps ranking. I wonder if there is an ideal ratioof tgese two items
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Apluswhs0 -
Is it OK to have a site that has some URLs with hyphens and other, older, legacy URLs that use underscores?
I'm working with a VERY large site that has recently been redesigned/recategorized. They kept only about 20% of the URLs from the legacy site, the URLs that had revenue tied to them, and these URLs use underscores. Whereas the new URLs created for the site use hyphens. I don't think that this would be an issue for Google, as long as the pages are of quality, but I wanted to get everyone's opinion on this. Will it hurt me to have two different sets of URLs, those with using hyphens and those using underscores?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Business.com0