SEO and Your URLs

Emily Creech - October 27, 2009

Have you ever conducted a search for your company’s most popular keywords and wondered why your site doesn’t rank very well for a particular keyword?   The next time you come across this situation, take a look at the domain names that actually are ranking well.   What do they look like?   What you might find is something like the image below:

Do you see a theme?   Notice that for the search “bicycle tires”, the keywords bicycle and/or tires are located within the domain name. When keywords are within URLs, especially the main domain name, the search engines can more easily determine that the website as a whole is about that keyword.  

This is why including keywords in your URLs is so important from a ranking perspective.   It may even make the difference between being on the first page of the search results and being hidden a few pages deep.   If your website’s main domain name does not include keywords, keep this principle in mind as you build out new pages. Where possible, include the targeted keyword(s) in the URL. For example, www.example.com/bicycle-tires

Having keywords within URLs is only one of the many components of search engine optimization (SEO).   A few of the other important aspects include making sure that the search engines can crawl your website, that there are highly relevant sites with links to your site, that are no technical issues, and that there is enough content on the site’s pages.   When focusing on SEO, it’s important to note that there isn’t one thing that you need to do; it is all of the components combined that will provide the greatest results.