Redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO

[Awaraman]

Hi,
I have two questions.

Question 1: is it worthwhile to redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO? For example, my company's webpage is www.example.com. Would it make sense to redirect the main site to address www.example.com/service-one-in-certain-city ? I am asking this as I have learned that it is important for SEO to have keywords in the URL, and I was thinking that we could do this and include the most important keywords to the subfolder / specific URL. What are the pros and cons and how important is it to include keywords to folders and page URLs. Should I create folders or pages just the sake of keywords?

Question 2: Most companies have their main URL shown as www.example.com when you access their domain. However, some multi-language sites show e.g. www.example.com/en or www.example.com/en/main when you type the domain to your web browser to access the site. I undertstand that this is a common practice to use subdomains or folders to separate the language versions.

My question is regarding the subfolder. Is it better to have only the subfolder shown (www.example.com/en) or should you also include the specific page's URL after the subfolder with keywords (www.example.com/en/main or www.example.com/en/service-one-in-certain-city)? I don't really understand why some companies show only the subfolder of a specific language page and some the page's URL after the subfolder.

Thanks in advance,

Sam

[SEOdub]

Hi SamuEU,

In general it is not good to have your home page be redirecting anywhere else on your website, often times spammy websites use re-directs to take users to a different page they may be hiding from search bots.  I would suggest creating the new keyword-relevant URL, but also creating an entirely new keyword-relevant page to gain traffic directly from the search-engines, then link to it in a way that makes sense from your home page.  This is a more natural way to use a keyword-relevant URL to gain search traffic.

Good Luck!

[vmialik]

Hello SamuEU,

1. Just creating folders or pages for the sake of keywords is useless thing to do solely for ranking, unless it helps with categorization for example, shop.com/shoes/nike/

2. en.blog.com vs blog.com/en/ work the same way, If you are moving sites, its a bit easier to move a blog/en/ site you dont have to deal with subdomains.

Another thing to consider generally the closer the page is to the domain tends to rank more.  All else equal:

shop.com/nike/ will tend to rank higher than shop/clothes/shoes/nike/ but its a small factor again if categories are needed and make sense go with categories.

Hope this helps