Using keywords in my URL: Doing a redirect to /keyword

[estebanseo]

My website in "On Page Grade" received an A.Anyway, I only have 1 thing to optimize:_"Use Keywords in your URL__Using your targeted keywords in the URL string adds relevancy to your page for search engine rankings, assists potential visitors identify the topic of your page from the URL, and provides SEO value when used as the anchor text of referring links."_My website is ranking in top10 for a super high competitive keyword and all my others competitors have the keyword on their domain, but not for my URL.Since I can't change my domain for fixing this suggestion, I would like to know what do you think about doing a 301 redirect from / to mydomainname.com/keyword/So the index of my website would be the /keyword.I don't know if this can make a damage to my SERP for the big change ir it would be a great choice.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I agree with Ryan.  The one thing to consider is whether redirects will help or hurt your site.  Even websites that are appropriately redirected lose some link equity in the process.  See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links.  Therefore, if the site has existed using the format domain.com/post-name for a long time and attracted links to those URLs, then the small benefit you get from redirecting to domain.com/keyword/post-name may be outweighed by the natural loss of link equity.

[RyanPurkey]

That's pretty far down the list of things that would improve your site's rankings so I'd ignore it at this point. Plus, you'd be redirecting a new creation that would have nearly zero rank value.

Instead I'd focus on getting links from a greater diversity of locations (more internationalization) and try to get some great PR as well. Plug your competitors into OSE and see where they're beating you in the numbers there as well as securing links from sources you're missing via the Link Intersect tab in the Link Opportunities part of OSE.  Cheers!