Keyword in url, which way better?

[Kotkov]

Hello, is there a difference between urls for targeting keyword "brazil tourist visa"

fastbrazilvisas.com/tourist

or

fastbrazilvisas.com/brazil-tourist-visa ?

ran the report In-Page Optimization it tells "no keyword usage in url". is there an idea behind that?

thanks

[Keszi]

Hi Serge,

Personally I always go after a "clean" URL. So if it would be my decision, then I would go for fastbrazilvisas.com/tourist.

Don't stuff your URLs with keywords for search engines, make them simple and easier to share.

I hope that helped,

Istvan

[Kotkov]

Thanks Istvan,

I think the same way. Just noticed yesterday a website that ranks pretty high for competitive keyword having long urls with keyword in domain and after slash. And after I saw the report from Seomoz I thought that maybe there is an idea behing that. Eventually google will decrease the importance of having keyword in domain. After the "/" it's a different story

[Resultify]

Hi Serge

My opinion is that having the key words in the URL definitively does not harm your ranking. Dependent on if its a very broad keyword or long tail keyword it might help more or less.

If you have a technical solution making it easy to create URLS with any name then why not.

Just make sure that if you do change the keyword focus of a page, be careful not to change the URL or you will loose your pagerank.

Most CMS now do an automatic 301 when you change the URL but even so it will take time to get the old pagerank back.

Also, like Istvan mentiones, some people actually do remember URLs instead of bookmarking them, so having too long and odd URLs might not be such a good idea.

Hope I could be of some assistance

Fredrik

[Keszi]

Serge,

I really believe stuffing the URL with keywords is at least so bad from SEO point of view like stuffing the content with keywords. One day these will be punished, or at least should be, because they are not placed there to help the visitors, they just want to add more and more related keywords in the URL.

For ex.

if the keyword I am targeting on the page is coffee i wouldn't create a page with the following url:

www.example.com/coffee-Coffee-COFFEE-etc.etc.etc.

That is soo bad. (although a lot of coffee makes people smile in the morning).

Gr.,

Istvan

[Kotkov]

Thanks for responses guys !

Istvan, coffee does make me smaile in the morning, but ofcourse i did not mean stuffing url like that. Just an example:

beginner-investing-made-easy.com/safe-investing.html

beginner-investing-made-easy.com/investing-pitfalls.html

Fredrik, thanks for an advice. I am aware of changing and redirecting urls. I am always trying to make urls shorter. Just started to notice that the importance of keyword after slash became greater.

[Keszi]

The links that you have pointed up as example here are tend to be user friendly

But if you look at your initial example: fastbrazilvisas.com/brazil-tourist-visa it would make me close the tab and try to never get back to the page. Because it looks very superficial.

Gr.,

Istvan