keywords in url

good/bad?

[leanweb]

i sell red widgets. the website is database driven, so i can pretty much make url for pages look like either

site.com/index/page

or,

site.com/red/widgets/page

[peewhy]

I would go for the latter. Any opportunity to use a valuable keyword I jump on it.

You certainly don't drop down by using keywords in the url even when there is no evidence that it gains in SERPS.

[contentmaster]

Its best practice to use keywords where ever possible without being overtly repetitive.........in your case, isn't it better that you name your pages in such a way that it reflects the content of your page

[decaff]

Four to five years back when AltaVista / HotBot / Lycos were the search engines to go after...having a keyword rich url was an advantage...now with so much determined by on page and off page elements the keyword rich url string is not as important...however...it can help to describe your page to site visitor and potential customer...

There was also a stretch over at Yahoo where you could spam the living daylights out of their directory with horribly long keyword specific url strings and do quite well....in fact, you still can but since the percentage of searches via the directory listings themselves has dropped dramatically since Yahoo hooked in Google results last fall, it's hardly worth the effort (though if Yahoo ever pulls from their directory again and hasn't found a way to address this issue then these domains will do well again..)

I am seen a certain amount of this going on at Google's SERPs ... but most of the time the off page elements are what get's you the high listings..

[mack]

I think the main advantage of keywords in a domain are for generating favourable anchor text in your inbound links. I think this would work better for widget_sales as oposed to widgetsales because google will read the first as two words whereas the 2nd would not be classed as a word and is unlikely to atract many search queries.

I think this is becoming less of an issue due to the down-grading of the importaince of anchor text.

Mack.

[leanweb]

thanks for good advice.

is there a limit to embedding keywords in URL? i mean i can go crazy:

site.com/red/widget/red+widget/redwidget/page

so is there a limit? when does it become se spam?

[peewhy]

I would suggest not even exploring the boundries of spam.

[leanweb]

i wasnt suggesting spamming. but hey, admit it, the difference between SEO and SPAM is mostly quantitive.

[peewhy]

Imagine a thin blue line, one side is absolute optimisation stretched to the limit, just about Google-legal. The other site is without question pure spam and supposing you are on the 'right' side of that thin blue line.

Then you awake one morning to find Google moved the goalposts ... you are now 100% spamming and you've been dropped.

When we hear the phrase .."don't even go there".

That's about right in this case. So whilst I understand you were not suggesting spamming, my advice of "I would suggest not even exploring the boundries of spam." ought to have been qualified by starting with ..Imagine a thin blue line...;)