SEO Basics, Using Keywords In Your URL

Real or Rumor?

Using keywords in your URL benefits your SEO. Absolutely!

Adding keywords to your URL's is another perfect opportunity to send the message to the search engines to identify you. Very few sites take advantage of this little known strategy.

This doesn't mean that you have to go out and purchase a new domain name. For example, our company Freedom Builders has the URL http://www.freedombuildersinc.com/ and one of our main keywords is SEO Services. We are not going to go out and purchase the URL SEOServicesFreedomBuildersInc.com.

But what we can do is use keywords to name interior pages throughout the site.

Let's take a commonly used example. Most sites have an 'About Us' tab. Again, using our site as an example, the typical link to that page would be FreedomBuildersInc.com/aboutus

In order to optimize the URL, "about us" should be replaced with a keyword or keyword phrase. FreedomBuildersInc.com/seoservices.

There is 1 more step - In order for the search engines to properly read the keyword phrase, an underscore character must be used to separate words.

So the proper optimized URL would read www.FreedomBuildersInc.com/seo_services.

The one time you would not want to change the URL to a keyword enriched URL is if you've owned your site for a long time and you have a high number of backlinks linking to that page. Changing the URL creates a brand new page and you will lose the SEO juice if you change the URL.

That's why engaging an SEO firm at the beginning of your site design is so critical. Or at any critical redesign point. You can test your site's SEO Level by visiting http://www.freedombuildersinc.com/. You'll receive a 21-point SEO Guide telling you step by step all of the things your site needs to be fully optimized!