20 replies to this topic

[Zriegle]

I am reconstructing the URL's for my company's website to be more Search Engine friendly and to better reflect our keyword choices. I have no experience in SEO or computers really, so it makes perfect sense!! Anyway, our URL's are static and contain one or two keywords from the page, however they are highly searched words (small business, business financing). Is their any benefit to lengthening our URL to add more specific keywords ie, /about/business-partners becomes /about/small-business-financing-partners. Does the addition hurt our crawl-ability and is there any real benefit to adding them?

Thanks for the help!

-Cornfused

[dharrison]

Hi zriegle

I don't think it makes much difference TBH. If you concentrate more on the Titles (most importantly), heading and copy of each page, that is what tells the search engines about the content of the page.

HTH

[Zriegle]

Thanks for the help D!

One question, what do you mean by copy?

[Randy]

Copy = The words on the page, your content.

As to the main question, you probably won't want to start changing your url addresses. It's the single biggest mistake I see people make.

Not only will you not get any major benefit from loading up your urls with keywords, you're going to effectively make each of the search engines start all over again in spidering, indexing and ranking the pages that make up your site. Changing your structure in this way --especially for the reason you mentioned-- is simply a really bad idea. It'll cause you months of pain if you do it.

[Jill]

I am reconstructing the URL's for my company's website to be more Search Engine friendly and to better reflect our keyword choices.

No, no, no! Don't do it!

Unless you're redesigning and have to change URLs anyway, it's just a silly waste of time to do it otherwise.

[raj_freind]

Zriegle you must rephrase your question in "How Can I get in search engines rank?"

If I am understanding correct then you need to go for specialist

[Keep Safe]

Does the url matter in seo at all? All my url's are dynamic ID based like this:
mystore dot com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=5

Would a static with keywords be better, with a 301 redirect to handle pages that are already indexed, like this:
mystore dot com/books/life_is_good

??

[Jill]

Lots and lots of threads on that subject here, Keep Safe. Try these:  keyword rich file names[/hr]

[shruchi nagar]

URL plays very important role for search engines. If your keyword lies in URL its really very beneficial.
Just keep in mind that whenever you change the URL of your website just don't forget to regenerate sitemap.xml and submit it to server.

[Randy]

URL plays very important role for search engines. If your keyword lies in URL its really very beneficial.

I beg to differ.

Have you ever actually tested this theory in a side-by-side test? I think you might be surprised by the outcome if you do.

[internetdominus]

Search engines can already read dynamic urls, so there really isn't a need to rewrite them, unless they are really long and ugly and will show on show serps, and confuse a possible visitor.

Only advantage of rewriting them is that your keywords will show on the url, and when a person does a search for a keyword that is on your url as well as your title, and description, GYM will show those keywords in bold to the searcher, and the searcher will assume that since everything is in bold on that listing, that listing is his best or closest option to click on.

[Jenniferlinn]

Static URLs are known to be better than dynamic URLs for a number of reasons:

1. Static URLs typically rank better in search engines.
2. Search engines are known to index the content of dynamic pages much more slowly than that of static pages.
3. Static URLs look friendlier to end users.

[Randy]

1. Wrong
2. Wrong
3. Debatable, and depends upon personal choice. One can be just as user friendly as the other.

[Traffic-Bug]

agree with Randy because it doesnt matter if your URL is static or dynamic. Static URLs may look friendly to actual users but to me it makes no difference when I am deciding whether to click through to a particular result or not. You can specify all your URLs in the sitemap and submit that sitemap. If your dynamic URLs have session IDs and lots of paramters in them then that may look like junk so you can use link rel=canonical tag in your head section so the engine assigns ranking to the canonical URL single time only

[1dmf]

Agree with Randy except...

3. wrong!

If you use SSI and set IIS to interpret HTML through the SSI processor, you tell me... is this a static or dynamic URL.


www.mydomain.com/index.html