Keywords In The URL A Good Idea?

[peter_d]

In some cases, but not all.

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/reasons...-in-your-urls/

If you have a page about blue widgets there are a few different ways to structure your URL’s:

http://example.com/blue-widgets/
http://example.com/bluewidgets/

However if you thought you were going to have more than blue widgets this would be more desirable url structure

http://example.com/widgets/blue/
http://example.com/widgets/red/

However is there’s anything that Web 2.0 and user generated content has taught us it’s that using the title to form the URL can have unpredictable results. You quite often end up with non keyword rich or focused URL’s instead you end up with things like this:

http://example.com/news/this_is_the_best_story_ever/
http://example.com/politics/is-this-guy-crazy/
http://example.com/cooking/matt-cutts-eat-babie/
http://example.com/look-ma-no-keywords-at-all/

The simple truth is that if your routine doesn’t eliminate “stop words” or funny punctuation or other issues with user generated words at some point down the road you’ll have problems (if you are on wordpress try the slug trimmer plugin it’s pretty good).

[Comenius]

Thanks, Peter.

It's funny how much time I spend pondering what title tags and URL paths to use. It's nice to have some additional points of view.

[EWSitesCom]

I have read that its always good to have the key phrase as the first two words in the domains.