Your keywords are a great tool to reach potential customers, so make them a priority. However, you should do more than just have those keywords in your tags and your text. They should also be found in your URLs. This is a logical step to really get more overall benefits from your SEO efforts. However, this continues to be an area where many website owners are dropping the ball.
Here is what Matt Cutts says about Keywords in URLs:
Your domain name is a big place to start. Do you have any of your effective keywords in it? This may be difficult to change now if you already have the business up and running. If you aren’t at that point yet, you want to make sure you get a domain name that has powerful keywords in it.
Think about your niche market for a moment. By doing so, you will quickly start to see many opportunities you have to put keywords into that domain name. You can also buy a domain name that has such keywords in it and use it for your existing website if you want through redirecting. This can be complex but it is a viable option if you want to take your SEO efforts to the next level.
If you don’t think that keywords in your URLs are important, you need to find out some history about all of it. You also need to find out what the leader in search engines, Google, has to say about it. Until 2005, Google was putting all of the emphasis on the websites that had keywords in their domain name.
That began to change though in 2005 and there were plenty of other elements that the search engine Google was basing ranks on. However, in the past year or so more of the weight has shifted back to the keywords being found in that domain name. With that in mind, doing so could help you to have an edge over your competition when you are parallel to them in so may other SEO elements.
You can also place keywords into your sub domains, but it is a bit more complex to accomplish. If your website has enough content to offer a separate segment for sub domains though then you should use them. You can use different keywords too in order to fairly represent different divisions of your business.
It is highly recommended that you place your keywords into the directory too. This allows you to properly categorize the website into plenty of smaller divisions and sections. You want to use keywords for your file names too so that they can be helpful with the process of describing what is on a particular web page.
Google isn’t the only search engine out there that gives more weight to a website when they have keywords in their URL. Make sure you keep things balanced though and that you don’t seem like you are stuffing materials anywhere that could get you banned. Doing it right can help you to get a great ranking placement with the various search engines.
