What's the best way to add phrase keywords to the URL?

[nataliefwc]

Hi,

Our keywords are all our service + a list of towns (for example, "carpet cleaning St. Louis"). The issue I'm having is that one particular site could be targeting "carpet cleaning St. Louis", "carpet cleaning Manchester", "carpet cleaning Ballwin", "carpet cleaning Kirkwood", etc. etc. etc... up to maybe 15 different towns.

Is there a way to effectively add these keywords into the URL without making it look spammy?

I'm having the same issue with adding the exact keywords to the page title, img alt tag, etc.

Thanks for any advice/input!

[SoleGraphics]

Adding the words to the URL doesn't have as much weight as doing the bigger stuff which is the titles, metas, img alts etc. The convention I'm used to is using human friendly URL paths so, www.yoursite.com/carpet-cleaning-st-louis, that way it looks clean and matches your KW/phrases you're tracking. I think the more important item to consider is you creating "value" on your pages so that they aren't considered "thin", which is what Google's panda update was/is targeting.

Hope that helps.

[nataliefwc]

Thanks for your help! I agree. I've always focused more on the content and value to the visitor but I've been playing around with the page grader tool and I'm finding that the majority of the pages have a B rating. Obviously, I'd love for all of them to have A's!

How would you suggest changing the page title to add these keywords? I'm concerned again about making it look spammy as well as exceeding the recommended character length. I feel like "Carpet Cleaning St. Louis, Carpet Cleaning Kirkwood, Carpet Cleaning Ballwin - Home" just does not look right... Any thoughts?

[SoleGraphics]

Depending on the client the convention can change. Here are two traditionally used ways to deal with titles

Keywords and phrases - Brand ( seems to be better because the keywords are first)

Brand - Keywords and phrases

or

Keywords - Location - Brand (adding more than one location would probably not work well)

Make the home page you primary location and deeper pages covering other locations. The example you provided does look a bit spammy due to the keyword being present multiple times and different locations being there.

Obviously there isn't a perfect way to do this. So do what makes sense and is considered best practices and then record the results and tweak it as necessary.