Company name doesn't have keyword: use domains instead?
-
Good Morning!
Now, I'll admit, I may be obsessing a little too much on this, and it may not make that big of an impact in the long run, but with Google being introduced to the world if I were to start a business today I would try and include my keyword into the title of my business. For example Dollar Shave Club, at least they got the word shave in there.
My business doesn't have a keyword in our name, is it beneficial to structure our URLs to include a keyword so that all of our URLs include that word? So if I sell organic bananas, but my company is called Evananas, is it worth it to have all domains become a child of Evananas.com/organic_bananas? That way at least we have the keyword "Organic Bananas" in our title?
So I could then have things like:
- evananas.com/organic_bananas/recipes
- evananas.com/organic_bananas/benefits
- evananas.com/organic_bananas/taste_really_freeking_good
Vs.
I'm not sure it makes a difference. The other problem is I want to keep our URL's as short as possible. I feel like less is always more, but I was always under the impression domain/URL based keywords were rather powerful. What is the best practice in this case?
Thanks Guys!
Evan(ana)
-
If those pages are getting traffic or have good links/referrals, then sure, redirect to the appropriate page.
What 'good' means really depends upon the vertical, but you know what pages get traffic and which are chaff.
Check your various link sources and site analytics.
Whatever doesn't make your cut, 410. Whatever makes the cut, 301 to a page with content relevant to the old page. Don't do a blanket (all old pages redirect to evananas.com) redirect. It's also a very good idea to consider responsive design, now that GWT is getting angry about improper mobile redirects.
-
Thank you both!
I would tend to agree with you about not rewriting my url's however we are redoing the website 100% and the website is in terrible shape. The previous seo guy tried to do what I am attempting to do, but to such a degree that a url would look like.
evananas.com/bannana/bannanas/organic/organic-bananas/recipes/cooking-at-home-with-bananas
literally.....
In that case would you consider doing a rewrite with a 301?
-
If this is an existing site, I would not change the URL structure just to include some keywords in there. The benefits of having a few keywords in the URL are outweighed by the risks. Even for a new site, shorter is typically better, like you said.
If you have a really large site with distinct categories, then having subdirectories makes sense. I would use dashes instead of underscores:
- evananas.com/organic-bananas/recipes
- evananas.com/non-organic-bananas/recipes
- evananas.com/plantains/recipes
Otherwise, just include the keywords in the page itself rather than creating a subdirectory just so your can have keywords in there:
-
You would do well to properly categorize your site. Yes, having a keyword in the URL is beneficial. There are ways to do that naturally, that make sense to search engines and people.
This would be a pretty good example of taxonomy:
evanorabilia.com/baseball-cards/houston-astros/nolan-ryan
I wouldn't recommend underscores in URLs. When The Googles is fairly transparent on something, I tend to cooperate.
So I would say you're likely fine. You can even go a little deeper. The search engine reason for flat architecture was due to crawling problems. As far as I know, they can easily handle deeper structure.
Though it may not be how you would like to handle navigation, you could do this:
Your nav might looks like this:
Home | Organic Bananas | Shop | Blog | Contact
-
Recipes
-
Smoothies
-
Pudding
If you simply must be 'flat', you can do this:
Your nav may look like this:
Home | Organic Bananas | Recipes | Benefits | Freeky Good | Blog | Shop | Contact
Personally, I like the taxonomy approach - but within reason. Both have their benefits, but I think the taxonomy approach gives you a little more room to grow.
Home | Organic Bananas | Organic Berries | Shop | Blog | Contact
-
Recipes
-
Smoothies
-
Pudding
Say you want to get into the organic berry market later?
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why some websites can rank the keywords they don't have in the page?
Hello guys, Yesterday, I used SEMrush to search for the keyword "branding agency" to see the SERP. The Liquidagency ranks 5th on the first page. So I went to their homepage but saw no exact keywords "branding agency", even in the page source. Also, I didn't see "branding agency" as a top anchor text in the external links to the page (from the report of SEMrush). I am an SEO newbie, can someone explain this to me, please? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Umbrella company is taking Domain and link strength!
Hi everyone! First thanks for reading this, I really appreciate it. The company I work for has two sites one is an event website and the other is a blog. The blog gets a great amount of the traffic and propels sales. The event website doesn't get much traffic but has been around for awhile and has garnered a 6 Google Page rank with a lot of backlinks and referring domains. The event website, though, has the same name of the company and this sometimes gets confusing when talking to businesses so the executives in charge want to make the event website an umbrella site for the company (very similar to Virgin's website). They will keep the event website but rebrand it with a new domain and basically start over. The good news about this is the event website, even though it has high link strength, has a lot of 404s because they had a previous database that they dumped leading to a lot of 404s (I made them change those to 410s). Here's my issue. I want to keep the SEO strength of the event website for the event website. Could I do a 301 redirect for a couple months and then take it off and make the umbrella site? Would the strength pass? Or would it be possible to do a 301 redirect in the subfolders where most of the content and links are? Or would you recommend another method of transferring the strength of the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Therealmattyd0 -
Does anyone know why my website's domain authority has dropped from 51 to 49
However this does not seem to be in isolation. All of my competitors websites have taken a similar 1 or 2 points hit. I am thinking that as an industry we may have been affected by a mutual linking site being taken down, redesigned or just loosing its own domain authority. We do rank well for our keywords and we have been on a continual rise since I took over in January, we do a little bit of a guest blogging and I am trying to build links to the site but I am doing it slowly. Would anyone else have an idea on what has happened that would cause 4 sites in the same industry to take a 1 or 2 point hit? Thanks, Emmet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CertificationEU1 -
Keyword Research: How best to target keywords without using a region as part of the search query.
When doing keyword research and trying to rank for a keyword. I am wondering if we need to localize the query by adding a city to it. For example Phoenix Web Design vs. just targeting web design since Google is localizing search results now. Then when creating content and optimizing the site do we just put the keyword in the title and page content or do we also add the region/city to the keyword phrase? Any insight would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hireawizseo0 -
Been away for a while is SEO really dead ? I don't think so...
I have been struggling with the google updates but recently we started a new project and by using guest blog posts we were able to achieve a top 3 ranking. It delivered traffic and sales so SEO still works. This is my understanding of the current situation - 1. Generic Keywords (forget it) 2. Go niche and long tail (but thats been the case for a while right) 3. Using related searches 4. Incoming links using brands and a wider range of phrases and urls. 5. Content thats sharable 6. Google plus buttons etc This is my current understanding I would love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Does it make sense to buy a domain to be used in a year or so?
Hi guys We all know domain age is a big win in domain authority, although I am thinking - does it make sense to buy a domain to be used later on for one of our future product lines? We can publish some content on it, link it from a few sites, however use it heavily after a year? All help will be much appreciated! Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wspwsp0 -
Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets 1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/ 2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/ The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down... .com/shop/wiget/color/shape/ The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc. Here are my questions. 1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer? 2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page? 3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page. I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying. As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets. Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SKP0 -
OOPS!! My website links the most to me, I can't get it??
Today, I have checked Google webmaster tools to get answer of following question. Who links the most to my website? I was assumed that Google webmaster tools provide me list of external website where I have created my text links. But, I can't get it when see my own website links the most to me. (4652??) I checked my other websites which are integrated in Google webmaster tools. They also developed on same platform as well as same internal linking structure. But, I am not able to find out similar issue over there. That's why I am quite confuse with Vista Store. How can I solve it? Does it really matter? "Open Site Explorer is my favorite one and always using that to get it done. But, Google webmaster tools is also active & free so why should I not jump in to... 🙂 "
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0