 | haleymcadams1 28th December 2011 4:31 PM |
“Calling all SEO gurus 
We have a new project for next year, and I'm currently looking around for a suitable URL.
We know exactly what keywords we want to target, and the market is quite niche, so I want to get the keywords in the URL.
URL doesn't have to be memorable, but are there any best practices in URL length, word separation by using underscores (last I heard, hyphens were a no no?).
The plan is to quickly be top of Google Page 1, but are we better separating words with underscores to make our keywords stand out, or are their any SEO penalties for this?
eg, I know people type in Steves Wonderful Widgets into Google to find my product, so I want my URL to be steveswonderfulwidgets.co.uk
But would I be penalised if I had steves_wonderful_widgets.co.uk which would display much clearer in the search results to the human eye?
If the URL was steves_wonderful_magnificent_&_incredible_widgets.co.uk is this too long? Technically I think its about 4000 characters for maximum length, but is there an SEO best practice length, like there is for page descriptions and titles? Or is it not a considered factor?
I think the URL, along with the page titles are the 2 most important factors in onpage SEO, so determined to get it spot on!”
We have a new project for next year, and I'm currently looking around for a suitable URL.
We know exactly what keywords we want to target, and the market is quite niche, so I want to get the keywords in the URL.
URL doesn't have to be memorable, but are there any best practices in URL length, word separation by using underscores (last I heard, hyphens were a no no?).
The plan is to quickly be top of Google Page 1, but are we better separating words with underscores to make our keywords stand out, or are their any SEO penalties for this?
eg, I know people type in Steves Wonderful Widgets into Google to find my product, so I want my URL to be steveswonderfulwidgets.co.uk
But would I be penalised if I had steves_wonderful_widgets.co.uk which would display much clearer in the search results to the human eye?
If the URL was steves_wonderful_magnificent_&_incredible_widgets.co.uk is this too long? Technically I think its about 4000 characters for maximum length, but is there an SEO best practice length, like there is for page descriptions and titles? Or is it not a considered factor?
I think the URL, along with the page titles are the 2 most important factors in onpage SEO, so determined to get it spot on!
”Well first of all let me clear all this things up. First, best URL to use is steveswonderfulwidgets.co.uk rather than steves_wonderful_widgets.co.uk or steves_wonderful_magnificent_&_incredible_widgets.co.uk. If you are going to use the third one (which I wish you don't) there is such a thing called URL encoding which replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits and & is one of those characters.
Second, using of hypens vs. underscores: The most advisable thing to do when choosing a domain name is to not use any hypens and underscores. steveswonderfulwidgets.co.uk is the most advisable URL. You can use either hypens or underscores when describing the path or folder (e.g. steveswonderfulwidgets.co.uk/category/sub_category or steveswonderfulwidgets.co.uk/category/sub-category) but in this case I go for hypens. People don't usually see underscores and mistook it for a space.
"That
haleymcadams1
