Top 10 SEO Tips and Tricks | URL Selection Tip 4

Posted • November 5, 2007 • 5 Comments

Tip 4 of my Top 10 Tips and Tricks for building a search engine optimized (SEO) website from the ground up is URL Selection.

URL Selection is exactly what it sounds like. It is the selection of the URL that will be used for your website. Why wait until tip number 4 to choose a URL? Don’t we want to choose an address first? No we really want to have a handle on the keyword and keyword phrases we will be dealing with before we choose the address the search engines will see as the first portal to your website.

The short and direct URLs are probably already taken. If you are willing to spend the money you can probably purchase the one you want. This is not necessary. Let’s continue to use the example we have been using “golf”. Now golf.com is probably already taken but with a little thinking outside the box we can come up with a very worthwhile one.

Why not just use the name of your company? If the name of your company has the top keyword or keyword phrase in even better. If your company name is, let’s say, Lalapalooza and your site deals with golf you may not want to use lalapalooza.com for your actual URL. If you have enough money to be able to market your company name “Lalapalooza” to the public as the authority on golf this will work. Then why are you trying to SEO your own website? Just hire me and I will take care of it for you.

As you can see from the screen shot above with the search “golf” three out of the top six sites listed actually have golf in their URLs. Two of the other three are PGA sites and the third is Wikipedia. Do you see a pattern here? If the top of your pyramid theme is golf you will have to have golf in your URL.

You will want a dot com ending if at all possible. Please check out my earlier blog post The Power of Suggestion, Subliminal Marketing, and the dot com. People are so used to using dot com for an URL it is a good idea to use one. Now you ask about dashes in the URL. Dashes are fine for the search engines but are not very user friendly. People are not used to typing dashes into URLs. So you can’t find the URL you want without dashes and with a dot com ending. There is a work around. It’s called the 301 redirect.

The 301 redirect is one of the best friends of the SEO. With the 301 redirect you can use one URL for the search engines and another to market your site to actual people. You could use all-about-golf.com as your actual URL and lalapalooza.com as the URL you advertise in print and in your emails. Your email address could be me@lalapalooza.com. If used correctly the 301 redirect makes the whole thing work seamlessly under the hood. Potential customers and or clients could enter lalapalooza.com into their browser and be transfered automatically to all-about-golf.com. The best part about a 301 redirect is that it is search engine legal. You will not be penalized for using a 301 redirect and you will still get the search engine juice from all-about-golf.com. There is a javascript redirect but it is not very search engine friendly.

Now that you have chosen your URL or URLs you can set this all aside and get ready for one of the most over looked parts of SEO Tip 5 Site Architecture.

late,
gary pool

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