SEO friendly URLs

8 February 2009

When navigating around this website, you will probably notice that all the URLs are SEO friendly URLs.

By that I mean, that the links to navigate around this website have keywords in them, and tell you what page you're going to. It's not just website.com/page/193

I've used keyword rich links for a few reasons...

  1. I setup the CMS to create the links like this by replacing all the spaces with hyphens.
  2. I thought that search engines, like Google, would see the keywords in the page link and then help the search rankings.
  3. It looks neater than a number that actually doesn't mean anything.
  4. And, it gives the website user and indication of what they're going to see on the next page.

I only learnt yesterday that actually Google doesn't look at keywords after the domain name, and so adding these SEO rich words won't actually help matters.

An article I read used YouTube as the example. YouTube links hold no keywords at all, just random letters and numbers - yet YouTube pages and videos tend to always rank highly.

So is there any bebnefit for Google in us using keyword rich URLs? Yes. As you'll see on the Google results page - Google makes bold all the keywords that you're searching for. It also does this in URLs, so if you have the keyword in the URL then it will go bold and give the user a good indication.

To read more about the workings of all this, please see a useful article I found at:
www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/seo-friendly-urls-myth-and-fact/

http://www.peternichol.com/entry/trackback/16/

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