Adding Search Phrases to Established URL to Improve Search Traffic?

[clickman]

Hi,

My site is listed as www.example.com

In order to rank higher in targeted searches, I would like to add additional keywords to my main landing page, something like;

www.example.com/keyword.htm (Or Better as?) www.example.com/keyword/

I have a few questions;

1. If I change my index page to that, will it foul up my current Google listings?

2. If someone enters www.example.com will it still go to my main page, or would they have to enter the "keyword" as well? Will I need some sort of re-direct if I do this?

Is there anything else I should consider/be aware of? I'm sure I haven't thought of everything.

Thanks, this is really a great site - learning so much.

[edited by: tedster at 8:30 pm (utc) on May 13, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello clickman, and welcome to the forums. Sorry, but your thinking here is going in a wrong direction, for at least a couple reasons:

1. When it comes to relevance, "keyword in the file path" is mostly a supportive signal for Google, and not a direct factor. On its own, it's pretty weak.

2. Redirecting the home page is a bad idea.

3. You've got an entire website to work with. It's full of pages and each one of them can rank for different phrases.

4. Cool URIs Don't change [w3.org]

[TheMadScientist]

Hi clickman,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

These recent discussions might help you out a bit too:
302 redirect for domain root - from Google's JohnMu [webmasterworld.com]

/thread-name.htm versus /forum-name/thread-name.htm [webmasterworld.com]

I agree with tedster though...
Leave them alone.

[clickman]

Thanks for the welcomes and reply's. Let me go a little deeper with my thought to try and clarify my thoughts/your advice. In my particular "Nitch" which doesn't have near the competition of many sites, if I can dominate on 2 keywords, I will rank very high. (yeah true with all sites, I know):-)

Of course I know there are MANY factors - links, content and so on. Here I am just trying to address the site URL nothing else. When I search for the top sites using those keywords, obviously those with them in their actual domain name show up at or close to the top. Others rate very well due to their better SEO, links and so on.

I have also noticed that a few sites with the keyword extension after the domain name also are among the top ranking sites. Since the domain names for my keywords are gone, I was wondering if for my landing page I used the keywords as an extension similar to;

www.example.com/keyword-keyword It seems to work for some sites, but probably I am missing something in my thought process?

Of course the other support pages will need to be optimized in other ways. I am just trying to position my index page in the strongest possible way.

Your advice is most appreciated.

[edited by: tedster at 10:45 pm (utc) on May 13, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]

[TheMadScientist]

Personally, I would not redirect the home page to another location, but I might consider moving the content of the home page to an internal location, putting a short welcome and single text link with a noindex robots meta tag on the home page and seeing what happens...

It's about the only way I would do what you are suggesting personally, but... It's not something I have tried or tested, but know Matt Cutts had his blog set up that way for quite some time. (I don't know if he still does or not and did not check on the noindex portion, but I know there was minimal text and a link to the actual location of the content on the domain root for quite a period of time at least.)

[buckworks]

trying to position my index page in the strongest possible way

There are better ways to achieve that.

Modifying an established URL merely for the purposes of keyword stuffing is a good way to shoot yourself in the foot.

Remember the virtue of simplicity, and resist SEO wishful thinking.

http://www.example.com/redundant/keyword-bloat/ is NOT a good URL for the home page.

Stick with

http://www.example.com/

or

http://example.com/

[clickman]

Resist SEO wishful thinking; You mean to tell me there isn't a "magic bullet" that will solve everything?

Thanks everyone, good advice that I will follow.

Back to the drawing board!

[TheMadScientist]

You mean to tell me there isn't a "magic bullet" that will solve everything?

Sure there is... Just put <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive"> in the <head> section of all your pages and you won't have to worry about your rankings again! (LOL)

[piatkow]

Get enough text on the home page to pick up your main searches. Structure your internal naming with relevant file and folder names and lots of good indexable content.