Whilst it is generally accepted that using a keyword search term as part of a web page URL will help to improve your search engine rankings, the exact position of the keywords within your website’s URL’s has always been a bit of a grey area.

However, Google’s Matt Cutts has recently clarified the situation. During a recent Google Moderator session he was asked if the position of keywords in the URL have any significant impact on ranking. For example is ‘example.com/keyword/london’ better than ‘example.com/london/keyword’?

Matt  decided to publish his answers in the following video:

It would seem that the official Google advice is that we should not obsess about the position of keywords within a URL, as they are unlikely to have any impact on a websites ranking, although having targeted keywords present within the URL will help a little bit. He warned that webmasters should not start stuffing keywords in the URL as this just looks spammy to users. He also suggests keeping the number of keywords in a URL to a minimum of 4 or 5.

So, if you are concerned about the position of the keywords within your URL’s, take the advice straight from Google and “don’t obsess” over it.

If you have any feedback based on your own experiences, feel free to let me know in the comments section below.

All of the major search engines use a wide range of highly developed algorithms to check the integrity of your website. Attempting to manipulate the search engine results, by using dubious techniques on your web pages, will almost certainly result in your site being banned!

The top 7 techniques to avoid at all costs are as follows:

• Do not purchase links from paid for link sites or link farms.
• Do not place hidden links are your website.
• Do not set up links from known spam sites.
• Do not stuff your meta tags or web page content with massive amounts of misleading or irrelevant keywords.
• Do not attempt to place hidden keywords within your web page content, for example white text on a white background.
• Do not copy content from another website or plagiarise existing content and claim as your own.
• Do not create one set of web page content for your visitors and a separate set of content dedicated solely to search engines (Cloaking)

If you try and use any of these methods, you may experience improved search engine rankings in the short term. However you will eventually get found out and your site will suddenly disappear from the search engine results, without any warning.

In the long term it is far more sensible to compete on a level playing field and only use Professional SEO techniques that are within the published editorial guidelines.

To learn more about search engine optimisation or for further information on our Link Building Service, please visit our website.

Developing your link popularity via submissions to online directories is an effective method of building one way links to your website. Directory Submissions remain one of the oldest and most reliable ways to generate one way links. Creating inbound links from search engine friendly, online directories is an essential part of the Website Promotion process and a proven method for developing your link popularity.

There are several thousand directories available online, that will list your website for free.

Obviously the quality of these directories will vary considerably and it is therefore worthwhile investing time in a little research, in order to create a list of your personally “approved” Directories. A good way to measure the quality of any Directory, is to identify their Google Page Rank score. The higher the Page Rank score, the quicker your listings are likely to be indexed, as the search engines will crawl higher ranked Directories more often than their lower ranked counterparts.

Compile a list of online directories that contain a relevant category for your website.

When compiling a list of your “favorite” online Directories, you will also need to establish if they offer a specific category that is relevant to your website. As there is such a wide range, it should not be that difficult to find suitable Directories that contain relevant categories that match your websites topic or product. Simply search for “directory listings” or “directory submissions” and you should find an abundance of online Directories offering a broad range of categories. For your Directory Submissions to be accepted, it is essential that your site is submitted to the most relevant category for your business. if you submit your site to the wrong category, it is unlikely that you will achieve a successful listing.

A wide choice of niche directories also exist, covering a wide range of topics.

If your website offers a niche product or service, you may wish to consider a more targeted approach for your directory submissions project. In order to find specific niche sites for your directory submissions, simply include a relevant keyword in your search term.  For example, if you wanted to promote a website specialising in Article Writing, you would need to include this keyword as part of your search, such as “Article Writing Directory” or Article Writing Directory Listings”.

Once you have compiled a detailed list of directories, that meet your criteria, you are now ready to submit your website.

The exact directory submissions process will vary. Although some Directories may require a fee for optimal exposure, the majority will list your website for free.  Either way, the process will require the completion of a simple online form. You will be requested to enter your websites URL together with a title and short description about your site and the service or products offered. You should include at least one targeted keyword or search term within your title and description and more, if space allows. This is extremely important and will increase the chances of your directory listing being indexed by the search engines and creating a recognised one way link to your website.

Directory submissions will help to improve the Link Popularity of your website. Although you will need to spend a little bit of time researching the directories, the benefits are worth well worth it as you could secure a lot of one way links without having to invest a huge amount of money.

According to comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, the number of people using their mobile device to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009. Among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35 percent) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives,” observed Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

“Social networking and blogging have emerged as very popular daily uses of the mobile Web and these activities are growing at a torrid pace,” observed Donovan. “We also note that much of the growth in news and information usage is driven by the increased popularity of downloaded applications, such as those offered for the iPhone, and by text-based searches. While smartphones and high-end feature phones, like the Samsung Instinct and LG Dare comprise the Top 10 devices used for news and information access,  70 percent of those accessing mobile Internet content are using feature phones.”

In January, 22.3 million people accessed news and information via a downloaded application. Maps are the most popular downloaded application with 8.2 million users, while search was the overwhelmingly favored use for SMS-based news and information access, with 14.1 million users. Overall, 32.4 million people used SMS to access news and information in January.

Young males are the most avid users of mobile news and information, with half of 18 to 34-year-old males engaging in the activity. The mobile Internet is also quite popular among females in the 18 to 24-year-old demographic, with 40 percent accessing it at least once in January.

It is important to ensure that your website has a well thought out internal link structure.

In addition to your standard page menu structure, providing extra links on a page to other relevant pages of your site will help users find the information they are looking for, more quickly. These additional links will also help search engines navigate your site more easily. If the anchor text used for the link contains your targeted keywords then these types of links will also help to improve the overall Link Popularity of your site.

Google has confirmed that you should use less than 100 internal links per page.

According to a recent Blog post by Google’s, Matt Cutts, you should use fewer than 100 internal links, per page.

“The original reason we provided that recommendation is that Google used to index only about 100 kilobytes of a page. When we thought about how many links a page might reasonably have and still be under 100K, it seemed about right to recommend 100 links or so. If a page started to have more than that many links, there was a chance that the page would be so long that Google would truncate the page and wouldn’t index the entire page.

These days, Google will index more than 100K of a page, but there’s still a good reason to recommend keeping to under a hundred links or so: the user experience. If you’re showing well over 100 links per page, you could be overwhelming your users and giving them a bad experience. A page might look good to you until you put on your “user hat” and see what it looks like to a new visitor” states Matt.

The “100 links” recommendation is also mentioned in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, Design and Content Section, which states:

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Of course, there may be some instances where you might have a completely valid reason for having over 100 internal links on a specific page, such as providing a large resource library or information directory. Because of this, Google will not automatically consider these pages spam, but they might choose to nofollow or not index some of these links.

For more information read Matts Cutts Blog Post in full.