Too Many Keywords In a URL? How Much's Too Much?

Marketing
1

Many folks here recommend including keywords inside each of your site’s URLs.

For instance, www [dot]website [dot] com/keyword1_keyword_2_keyword_3_keyword_4_keyword_5 and on and on.

BUT HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?

Can one create a URL for a webpage containing a whole search query-type phrase?

For example: www[dot] website[dot]com/who_is_best_diesel_truck_engine_and_transmission_mechanic_in_miami_florida_fl_dade_county_southern_florida_near_south_beach_305_area_code_with_payment_plans_low_prices[dot]



Lastly, If I already started using underscores ( _ ) to separate keywords in my URLs on some pages and then [I]switch [/I]to using hyphens (-) would this create a problem where some pages will be more SEO friendly than others? Or where only the underscores will work but not the hyphens?
2

From personal experience and the little SEO that I’ve done I would keep URL’s MUCH shorter than what you suggested, the title of the article/page is quite good to use, keep key words within the page itself.

3

It is better to keep your site’s url with less keywords instead of stuffing more. I always give much preference to ‘-’ hyphen than ‘_’ underscore.

4

Filenames that long start to look like spam, and they will certainly make it harder for people to share links. The shorter and snappier, the better. If the URL will fit in a tweet, great. If it can easily be read out and re-typed, great. If it can fit in a single line in one column of a printed page (eg a newsletter), great. If it’s longer than that, you’re going to lose direct traffic and referrals, and that is likely to do you more harm than the tiny percentage chance that you’ll drop by a googleplace as a result of not stuffing your URL with keywords.

Although Google used to treat underscores as characters rather than word breaks, that changed a couple of years ago, and other than specific phrases that include an underscore (such as mod_rewrite), they are now treated as word breaks just the same as dashes.

5

Stevie D, that was a phenomenal answer. Very informative and helpful. I shall shorten my URLs. I was stuffing up to 20 keywords in each url and separating them with underscores thinking hyphens/dashes would be misinterpreted by the search engines.

6

Here is some advice when building URLs. FORGET ABOUT THE SEARCH ENGINES. Focus only on the people that will use them. A search engine could careless about your fancy URL. People are the ones that have to interact and use them. Give them the focus not some dumb machine.

7

Too many is when you’re adding keywords just for search bots.

My general rule of thumb is to use the page title, replacing spaces with dashes.

For example, a blog post called “Ten Ways to Defend Yourself Against the Honey Badger” would look something like:

/blog/2011/ten-ways-to-defend-yourself-against-the-honey-badger/

Just an example. Honey badgers don’t usually attack people.

8

target only as minimum number of keyword within the url as you can. rather concentrate on choosing the niche and most relevant keyword.

Using more keywords within the url and increasing the length will dilute the effect and sometimes confuses users too.

9

Too long, and too many ‘filler’ words.
How about “defence-against-honey-badger” … shorter, snappier, less to type, no wasted words.

10

That’s just what I do. A big waste of time trying to optimize URLs that much IMHO. Nobody types URLs in like that anyway, it’s just unrealistic.

We all have our own way of doing things though!

11

One and two keywords is batter on URL, use can use keywords on meta tags and content.

12

There’s not much more to know. Search engines typically truncate the <title> at about 65 characters in the search results. You can have a longer title than that if you want, but make sure all the important stuff comes in the first 60 characters, or else it might not be shown in the search results.

13

mmmm, I’ll go with 1 url of internal page - 1 keyword/keyword phrase

14

From my experience this is how a URL should be structured:

http://www.domain.com/mens/designer-name/tshirts

Notice how it is only 3 levels deep which is good for SEO and the full length is less that 62 characters. Keep your URLs simple and to the point.

Never stuff keywords in URLs, just make them read nice, so the above would read “mens designer tshirts” - great for SEO.

Having 4 levels deep isn’t a problem, its just my personal preference never to go 3 deep.

15

Well URL optimization is one of onpage SEO techniques.And one should use only keywords in URL.But using too much keywords looks spamming and Search engines limit the crawling if the page URL contains too many keywords. Generally keywords not beyond 10 in your web page URL is the best. Search engines always prefer short and descritive URLs.Also keep your primary keywords near to the starting point of your URL.

16

Stevie D, that was a extraordinary response from you, URL structure should be unique… Now days google is too much sharp against spamming. so be careful from these all issue which are indicate like spamming

17

i heard the most probable number of keywords is about 3 to 5

18

You should have exactly 3.325 keywords in the URL. Any more or any less and Google will laugh at you, unless it’s a compound multiple of pi :rolleyes: