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One Benefit of Keywords in URLs for SEO

There have been a good many discussions on the importance of keywords in URLs when it comes to ranking search engine optimization.

Most of that talk has been based around the question: “Do keywords in your url help to boost a sites ranking in the search engines?” This has mostly been in the context of being relevant to the rest of the keywords in the page.

One of the most important factors (IMO the most important factor) in SEO is inbound links, or other websites linking to your page. This alone can boost a site to the number one spot for a particular keyword/ phrase.

Looking closer at links, the anchor text, or text within the <a> tag of a link is the most important part of a link, because it tells the search engines what keywords are relevant to the page that that link points to.

So it would make sense for us to try to get links with our targeted keywords in them then, right? The problem is that the majority of people use anchor text like this, or here, or click here when linking to other sites. While those links will help build link popularity, they don’t really help you to target keywords. But take a look at this link:
http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html
This may just be with my site, but it is a common link structure for people to use. Especially in forums.

Even though it was one of the last things I was concerned about when creating the page, the URL actually contains to pretty good keywords, (http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html) pr check, and pagerank, and by doing an allinanchor search for these terms shows that that page comes up in the top 1oo for both. Top 10 for allinanchor:pr check, and top 100 for allinanchor:pagerank.

So here are some pointers URL writing

  • add targeted keywords to URLs
  • separate keywords with a hyphen ( – ), not an underscore( _ ). A hyphen separates words, while an underscore just blurs them together.
  • keywords in domain names can be helpful, but are not really that important

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