Should I use an acronym in my URL?
-
I know that Google understands various acronyms. Example: If I search for CRM System, it knows i'm searching for a customer relationship management system. However, will it recognize less known acronyms? I have a page geared specifically for SAP data archiving for human capital management systems. For those in the industry, they simply call it HCM. Here is how I view my options:
Option #1: www.mywebsite.com/sap-data-archiving/human-capital-management
Option #2: www.mywebsite.com/sap-data-archiving/hcm
Option #3: www.mywebsite.com/sap-data-archiving/hcm-human-capital-management
With option #3, i'm capturing the acronym AND the full phrase. This doesn't make my URL overly long either. Of course, in my content i'll reference both. What does everyone else think about the URL?
-Alex
-
I agree with Kevin, use what is common for those that are searching for the information, and think using both is a good idea. In my industry it is common to see both city and airport code in the URL
Example of what I commonly see:
http://www.kayak.com/flight-routes/United-States-US0/Seattle-Tacoma-Intl-SEA
http://www.kayak.com/flight-routes/Los-Angeles-LAX/Seattle-Tacoma-Intl-SEA
http://flights.expedia.com/flights-from-seattle-to-los-angeles-sea-to-lax/
-
Alex, I prefer to have the most relevant term in the url. No big issues with what your doing except the url being a bit more difficult to understand. If you do decide on one term, I don't think you will be missing out on traffic for the other term as the rest of your on-page seems to be optimized properly for the that term as well. Good luck!
-
Thanks. I agree that it makes it a bit more difficult to read. I had planned on putting "Human Capital Management (HCM)" in the meta description and page title, but will likely use just the acronym in the body. Since that's easier to read, maybe I should do the same in the URL by placing the acronym at the end of the phrase instead of the beginning. That eliminates the readability issue and incorporates the acronym. While people mostly use the acronym, there are so many keywords in the phrase and I don't want to miss out on that.
What do you think?
Thanks for your fast response.
-Alex
-
IMHO, whatever the prospect is more likely to query use that in your url since it will be highlighted. I would probably not group them together as it makes the url a bit more difficult to read (so options 1 and 2 will work). Furthermore, whatever you chose I would put in the meta description "Human Capital Management (HCM)..." in case the prospect choose one or the other and include both variations on the landing page.
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
-
Will changing a URL negatively affect ranking?
Hello Mozzers, We would like to change the URL for a page on our website which ranks well for some our keyphrases/words. We are hoping the change of URL, through the addition of an additional keyword would help boost the rank of that URL further. At the moment out page gets 2 x A and 2 x B 1xF on the MOZ page rank tool using 5 keyphrase/word variations . One phrase ranks 4, one ranks 3 and the other 3 are 'not in the top 50' Our plan was to change the URL, using SHF404, and use 'Fetch' in the Google search console to re-submit the page to Google. Appreciate you can't give any guarantees how Google will behave, just wondered what your thoughts were on the wisdom of changing the URL in the first place? Thanks Ian
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create0 -
Language for URLs on new international websites
We are due to launch our new site and it will be targeting an international market. We have setup these new sites in the following way www.website.com/fr/content-goes-here www.website.com/es/content-goes-here This has been done in conjunction with setting up the parameters in GWT and making sure it is optimised for the language itself, and that countries search engine. But our web dev team have said that the URLs at the moment will be in english and not the native language, so if you were on the french version of our site you would see the url in english and not french. Will this negatively affect the site for SEO, and who else would think it would be negative from a usability perspective? Any help is appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | RyanCrawf19840 -
URL contain special character
Hello, I am using URLs which contain special character such as ', ". I found in the Google Webmaster Tool report errors related URL contain ' character. Google have indexed partial URL from beginning to ' character and cut off the rest of URL. For example: I submitted URL www.example.com/vietnam-visa-corp'-test-page.html, then google report error NOT FOUND for URL www.example.com/vietnam-visa-corp I don't know why and how to fix it? Please help! Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh1 -
Replacing website, same URL, lose ranking
We had to do a rush job for a client and get a website up very quickly. We had to just replace the existing files on the server, but URL stayed the same. Now "teeth whitening glasgow" which they were number #1 for isn't coming up. Know there is still some on page work to be done - but the link profile should still remain the same? Just looking for some advice to get back to where they were - should we do a website change of address or just verify the site in Webmaster and get all the on page done? Thanks, Laura
On-Page Optimization | | lauratagdigital0 -
Should I use bolded keywords for keywords in the content throughout the page?
If I'm trying to optimize for a specific keyword, should I bold all of the keywords that appear in the content of the page or just one or two? or none at all?
On-Page Optimization | | globalrose.com0 -
Close URL owned by competitors.
The following example is exactly analogous to our situation (site names slightly altered😞 We own www.business-skills.com. It's our main site. We don't own, and would rather avoid paying for, www.businessskills.com. It's a parked domain and the owners want a very large sum for it. We own www.business-skills.co.uk and point it to our main site. We don't own www.businessskills.co.uk. This is owned by our biggest competitor. We also own www.[ourbrand].com and .co.uk, and point them to the main site. My question is - how much traffic do you think we may be missing due to these nearly-but-not-quite URL matches? Does it matter in terms of lost revenue? What sort of things should I be looking at to get a very rough estimate?
On-Page Optimization | | JacobFunnell0 -
Robots.txt: excluding URL
Hi, spiders crawl some dynamic urls in my website (example: http://www.keihome.it/elettrodomestici/cappe/cappa-vision-con-tv-falmec/714/ + http://www.keihome.it/elettrodomestici/cappe/cappa-vision-con-tv-falmec/714/open=true) as different pages, resulting duplicate content of course. What is syntax for disallow these kind of urls in robots.txt? Thanks so much
On-Page Optimization | | anakyn0 -
Should a no-follow tag be used on a ssl or trust seal?
I'm just wondering if there would be some benefit if this was followed since the purpose of it is to add trust to your site.
On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst0