Keywords in Your Website URL – Should an SEO Worry About It

Should you use your keywords in the URLs of your web pages? Do search engines look at the keywords that are included in the addresses of your web pages and do these keywords have an effect on the website SEO rankings ?

Google’s Position About Keywords in URLs

Google’s Matt Cutts recently posted a video about keywords in the URL of a web page. He said that keywords in the URL do help a little bit.

He also said that one should not obsess with the order of the words and that you should not use too many keywords in the same URL.

Experts in the field confirmed that having a keyword in the URL contributes less than 5% to your first page ranking, i.e., don’t waste your time and effort.

Yahoo’s Position About Keywords in URLs

Yahoo filed a patent application with the name “Techniques for Tokenizing URLsthat was published on March 26th. The patent application contains information on how search engines might extract keywords from the URLs of pages.

Search engines look at many different web page elements to determine what a page is about. Most keywords are extracted from the content of the web pages, but search engines can also consider the URL of a web page to find related keywords.

Yahoo’s patent shows in detail, how keywords can be extracted from URLs. That’s a strong indicator that Yahoo also considers the keywords in URLs.

What Does This Mean For Your Website?

If you want to get the best possible rankings for your website, it can help to include target keywords in the URLs of your website. However, it is important not to overdo this, so that the search engines don’t think that you’re spamming. Keywords in the URLs of your web pages can improve the position of your web pages in Google’s search results.

Post to Twitter

Speak Your Mind

*