Optimized URLs For Search Engine Rankings

Your site URL plays an important role in several areas:

Branding – If you provide products and/or services, having a easily identifiable name helps associate that product or service with your company. Let’s say you provide travel information. By having a URL like travel.com, you instantly brand yourself with that service and become an authority. Of course, URLs like travel, mortgage, health, etc are already taken. Even if they were to be sold, there is a significant premium on the name, much more than most people would want to pay. I’ll cover how you can bypass using commonly identifiable URLs with URLs that still help to brand your business in a moment.

Site name can be synonymous with URL – This is especially useful when adding your URL to directories like DMOZ which is very strict on accepting URLs with the name of the site only and not a bunch of keywords.

Keyword rich – You can place the most profitable keywords for your business in this URL. This adds to your optimized title tag and your keywords on your pages. It also lets you “sneak in” some of the keywords you want into directory submissions.

While optimizing your website for top ten rankings with a well-chosen and well-defined URL is beneficial, be careful not to overdo it. Here’s something you definitely want to avoid: URLs that look like spam to the search engines. An example would be like this site www.debt-consolidation-loans-credit-card-debt-reduction-services.com. This URL has 64 characters including the .com! It’s rather obvious to anyone that they are trying to optimize their site for several keywords at one go – debt consolidation loans, credit card, and debt reduction services among others. Besides the keywords, the words are separated by dashes to help break up the words.

As a human seeing this URL, it looks very unnatural and so too will the search engines. If the webmaster isn’t careful, he could be hit with over-optimization penalties. It’s like raising a big red flag announcing to Google, “Look at me!”

Although dashes help break up keywords and may help distinguish the individual words in a URL, this is not necessary today. Search engines are getting smarter and can now distinguish the individual words in a URL even without the dashes. URLs without the dashes are also easier to remember because most people naturally type the words together and not add dashes in it as they type from memory.

URLs are just one part of the equation in ranking your website. At times, it may even be advantageous to create unique URLs from combining with another to establish a brand. This is especially true if you have thought up a catchy name that’s easily memorable. An example is Greenzap. This is a funds transfer service that functions much like Paypal. If you zoom over to that site, you’ll be able to get $25 webcash, courtesy of a referral from me. The name is catchy, memorable, unique and easily identifies the service.

Before rushing to reserve a domain name, take the time to brainstorm and research good keywords for your site and test various combinations of them manually at domain registrars like godaddy.com. Unless you’ve found one that is exceptional, put together a list of possibilities so you can make a final determination of which to pick. This may be long tedious work for a couple of hours or even days but well worth it if you come up with a domain that’s not already taken and helps to brand your business and your product/service.

Another consideration to take into account is the reservation of several good domains you discover. Even though ‘domain squatting’ is not likely to be very profitable, having multiple domains can help you dominate the search engine results pages. Imagine having 4, 5, or even 8 or ten of the top ten results on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs) listing your sites! You would be able to dominate your industry for those keywords online and garner a significant chunk of online business profits.

A domain name costs less than $10 a year but it can yield many search engine optimization benefits if used correctly.