Yeap URL naming is crucial in terms of SEO and for achieving good rankings for your keyphrases. Try and get your keywords into your URLs as much as possible. If you combine this with good, well conceived Page Titles and  relevant incoming links from authority sites you'll be fine.

Check out this article on setting up a search engine friendly website structure if you want any further information. Alternatively you'll get lots of information from e-Consultancys own SEO Best Practice Guide

Andrew Allfrey
www.e-prominence.co.uk
Search Engine Optimization Company

On 13:43:48 9 May 2006 RonnieLassiaille wrote:

 

Dear Ashley,

Do you have any idea whether URL naming is important in search engine ranking? Your own e-consultancy pages have ASP URLs, which apparently is not very search engine friendly :), but I'm looking for articles/post on the naming of URLs to find out whether they actually also play a role in search engine ranking.

Would appreciate your help.

Kind regards,
Ronnie

 

It definately me ight be important :-)  Certaingly some of the work I have done with clients suggests that Google and the other major search engine DO like relevant URL's, but the benefits are small.

It really depends on your situation ... if I was launching a new travel site, and the majority of my competitors for the keyword "travel" that were in the Top 10 of a major SE had that word in their URL, then I would definately do the same.

Ranking really is more about the number of good quality links to you, clean coding and relevance of overall site, than it is about the URL.

Hope that helps a little!

Andrew

On 13:43:48 9 May 2006 RonnieLassiaille wrote:

 

Dear Ashley,

Do you have any idea whether URL naming is important in search engine ranking? Your own e-consultancy pages have ASP URLs, which apparently is not very search engine friendly :), but I'm looking for articles/post on the naming of URLs to find out whether they actually also play a role in search engine ranking.

Would appreciate your help.

Kind regards,
Ronnie

 

They are two excellent points Ashley.  

We have done some tests on nicely re-written URLs, and they definitely make a difference.  Probably one of the main reasons is that people linking to you will often use the URL rather than the anchor text you would like them to use, like you said.  Another point worth mentioning, although it's old hat now, is that hypens should be used rather than underscores between words in your URLs.  Google views hyphens as a delimiter between words, where it hasn't looked at underscores in the same way.  Also, a link containing underscores can easily be misread if the link is underlined and someone is writing down the link for later use.

The second point you mention is also worth considering.  This is where a well crafted meta name description is important.  It's not going to help you rank any higher, but it can make your link more compelling and appear more relevant than other links around it.

Cheers,

Daniel

On 10:21:28 10 May 2006 Ashley wrote:

 

However, from an SEO perspective they are very important (we've found) largely because of keyword relevance / density. Not only it is good to get the keywords into the URL but often people will link to your site using your URL - thus embedding anchor text in their link which uses your keywords. Which is nice.

Also, we believe we get a slightly higher clickthrough rate on natural search listings where the search string is in the URL - have a look at http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:2006-07,GGLJ:en&q=seo+guide where we come 3rd and 4th. Look at the URL and you'll see the search string bolded.  

 

 

 

Dear all,

Thank you very much for all these great tips. We use a CMS, which makes it quite difficult to enforce the rules sometimes, but at least this will allow me to write up a little guide. I have the same type on PDF naming: is there any rule on how to name pdfs in a search engine friendly way? 

Thank you very much,
Ronnie