I had a recent discussion with a client who had been told that their site wasn’t optimized for Google. Ignore the fact that the site ranked #1 for every variation of the three phrases they were targeting. What they heard (probably only part of what was said) was that Google likes dashes in urls, and their site (which was built 4 years ago) wasn’t using them.
This is a tough (read irritating) conversation for me. Technically, URL optimization is a good thing, and I’m all for it. If you’re competing for rank for a popular phrase / topic, you want to stuff keywords into URLs (i.e., /products/canon-slr-digital-5d-camera). It’s one more way to help Google properly index your content.
But the important part of this practice is not to focus on adding hyphenated phrases throughout your site because you feel it makes URLs more human-readable. It’s adding relevant content hooks where appropriate. With that in mind, you should be focusing on adding phrases that you want to gain rank on (i.e., Canon SLR cameras) vs adding phrases that simply lengthen your URLs.
If your site structure is similar to the site we were discussing — a products overview page (/products/), a services overview page (/services/), an about page (/about/), and a contact page (/contact/) — there is little to be gained from stuffing pronouns like our- or -us into the URLs (i.e., our-products, contact-us). The URLs are no more readable, and any potential SEO gain is negligible.
But, it can’t hurt anything, right? Well, it can if you go overboard.
1. Site visitors still email addresses. Hyphens make convenient places for line wraps, effectively breaking links in many email clients.
2. People still direct type URLs. Longer, hyphenated URLs are harder to remember, harder to type, harder to recognize in browser history.
I’m all for SEO best practices. But there’s a point we need to take a breath and ask ourselves if we really need to ensure our contact form page is url-optimized.
Start with the code and the copy (i.e., the content.) Work out from there. Remember that SEO hacks aren’t universally applicable.
I am always amazed by people who do not think they are Google optimized just because they are not on the first SERP. Hey people, wake up. It is not Google’s job to index your site and send you thousands of highly targeted clients for FREE. It does happen, but it takes work, luck, great content…LUCK and work for a highly competitive term. Want URL optimization, try good content with a domain like creditcards.com and Google will read it just fine.
Oh for the days of unlimited free traffic, URL and keyword stuffing, indexing and 1st page organic rankings within 2 days…Altavista, where are you?
Yeah. I miss Altavista (selectively.)
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