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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 16:22 and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.