One common question from aspiring webmasters and SEOs is whether you can benefit from having keywords in your URL. Does Google place a premium on websites who do somehow incorporate keywords into their domain names?
I’m afraid to say no one can answer that question beyond a reasonable doubt. Some websites seem to benefit from it more than others.
A recent Search Engine Roundtable post discusses this issue with two extremes – one saying they don’t matter at all and the other saying they’re quite the necessity.
A lot of the answer to this question depends on how competitive your keywords are…if you’re in a highly competitive industry, you’re not likely to see much of a boost from having keywords in your URL. Take our URL for example – having SEO in there may help some but we’re certainly not depending on the URL to bring us high rankings.
As we’ve discussed before, Google’s algorithm consists of many different elements that are each weighted differently.
So the best advice and way to think about keywords in the URL – don’t worry too much about it!
That’s right, work on building content, links and a crawlable architecture that’s easily indexed by the search engines. Over time, this is what builds sustainable search engine rankings, not just some keywords in a URL.
They can give you a slight edge but it just depends. The better way is to choose a URL that you want because it’s going to be with you for a very long time. Besides, those particular keywords may cease to be relevant in the future.