URL Optimization: optimizing your URLs for better rankings

Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 2:45 pm

Everyone tends to focus on on page and off page SEO but most people forget that the URL is important and that a good URL optimization can help you get better rankings.

Here are some quick tips about optimizing your URLs for better rankings.

1. Use main keyword in domain name

You will always want to register a domain name that has your main keyword in it. This is a key point if you want to rank better with your URL. If your website is about dog training, you will try to register a domain that has dog training in it.

2. Choose your TLD

Then, I recommend using .com, .org and .net in this order of importance. This is what people use and know most, and they also appear more often in the search engine results.

However, although I have not really tested the influence of the TLD on the rankings, I don’t believe it to have a real influence, so using .biz, .us or other TLDs might as well be fine.

3. Avoid using subdomains

If the domain name of your main keyword is already taken, you can think of using a subdomain. The main advantage of using a subdomain is that you have your keyword come first in the URL and this can boost your rankings. However, I would be very careful with this because it appears that many people use this technique to spam the search engines, and Google is going to catch up on this sooner or later.

The main drawback of using a subdomain, and that’s why I recommend to avoid this method, is that by doing so you will lose all the power (link juice) of your main domain, as well as your PR (pagerank).

For instance, an article posted on a new subdomain: subdomain.domain.com will not benefit from the age, PR and link juice of your domain.com. Instead, you have to post the article into domain.com/folder so that it can benefit from all the backlinks you have created for your domain.com as well as its PR.

More tips coming soon…stay tuned.