Keywords in URL
In the world of search engine optimisation we look at various ways we can manipulate our keywords in to getting us those all important rankings. A lot of people around the web have different opinions some say having your keyword in your URL will improve rankings, some say even if it does get you rankings it will only make an unnoticeable difference and some say that having a keyword in your URL doesn’t make a difference. It is tough at times trying to figure out who’s opinion to listen to most. The reason for this is nobody shows much research information that will help you in your quest to find the answer.
There are few examples around the web that shows some results that can be found merely just by having the keyword in the URL; most of these tests have shown that most of the top search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) all use the keywords in URLs to help rank a page. They obviously dont base the ranking purely on the result but it will help; you must have relative content to stay ahead. A lot of people say having a file name / address that is relative to your content helps these search engines judge the quality of your page and its content.
Hyphens or Underscores
When testing this theory on the various search engines people found that hyphens (-) are noticed by the search engines as word separators where as an underscore (_) isn’t. This means having a URL like “http://www.myshop.com/Category1-Category2-Category3_Category4.html” and searching for each category individually will probably find your web page however searching for Category4 won’t return your result; this is because the search engines tend to ignore the “_” and would class “Category3_Category4″ as a single word. However, searching for “Category3_Category4″ would turn up your result.
When creating an e-commerce site it is useful to have URLs like this as it helps not only the users but also developer. Having URLs like this allows the developer / website owner, to easily figure out where errors may be coming from depending on the page its on. From a users perspective it is useful as the URL is a lot more memorable, this is a definite plus as if they can remember your URL they are more likely to type it in again to see your new products. It also allows URLs to be more understandable.
I hope this has helped you figure out whether keywords in the URL are important or not. Try researching into this, if you feel I am wrong, feel free to discuss this in the comments.
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