October 3, 2008 by Matt Thomas
There are some people who swear by keeping their URLs loaded with keywords in order to help sites climb the rankings and others who say that it makes almost no difference.
So, who’s right? How important are URL keywords really?
Before I answer that, let me just make one thing completely clear. When I talk about keywords in terms of URLs, I’m referring to the whole string rather than just the domain name. For example, if you had a food site you could have a URL like this, www.foodsite.com/peas/carrots/steak.
A URL full of keywords like that would probably bring you clear SEO benefits. However, it is completely possible to rank well with no keywords whatsoever in the URL. The general guideline is that having keywords in your URL or not isn’t a make or break decision for your site’s rankings. The benefits of having keywords there are slight but real. In my opinion, for the effort it takes to put them there, you might as well have them.
Another factor is that keywords often increase the chance that someone will click on your link. If they see actual words rather than a meaningless stream of letters and numbers they are able to ascertain immediately whether or not the link is relevant to them.
Be wary though, do not make your URLs to long. Searchers have problems remembering long URLs, also, probably more importantly, long URLs can be harder for search engine spiders to index and could possibly lead to your page not showing up on search engines results page at all.
Overall, it’s something to think about, but don’t lose sleep over it. Remember, you’re much better off worrying about things like links and headline keywords, that’s the bread and butter of your site.
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