Company name doesn't have keyword: use domains instead?

[HashtagHustler]

Good Morning!

Now, I'll admit, I may be obsessing a little too much on this, and it may not make that big of an impact in the long run, but with Google being introduced to the world if I were to start a business today I would try and include my keyword into the title of my business. For example Dollar Shave Club, at least they got the word shave in there.

My business doesn't have a keyword in our name, is it beneficial to structure our URLs to include a keyword so that all of our URLs include that word? So if I sell organic bananas, but my company is called Evananas, is it worth it to have all domains become a child of Evananas.com/organic_bananas? That way at least we have the keyword "Organic Bananas" in our title?

So I could then have things like:

• evananas.com/organic_bananas/recipes
• evananas.com/organic_bananas/benefits
• evananas.com/organic_bananas/taste_really_freeking_good

Vs.

• evananas.com/recipes
• evananas.com/benefits
• evananas.com/taste_really_freeking_good

I'm not sure it makes a difference. The other problem is I want to keep our URL's as short as possible. I feel like less is always more, but I was always under the impression domain/URL based keywords were rather powerful. What is the best practice in this case?

Thanks Guys!

Evan(ana)

[Travis_Bailey]

You would do well to properly categorize your site. Yes, having a keyword in the URL is beneficial. There are ways to do that naturally, that make sense to search engines and people.

This would be a pretty good example of taxonomy:

evanorabilia.com/baseball-cards/houston-astros/nolan-ryan

I wouldn't recommend underscores in URLs. When The Googles is fairly transparent on something, I tend to cooperate.

So I would say you're likely fine. You can even go a little deeper. The search engine reason for flat architecture was due to crawling problems. As far as I know, they can easily handle deeper structure.

Though it may not be how you would like to handle navigation, you could do this:

• evananas.com/organic-banana/recipes/smoothies
• evananas.com/organic-banana/recipes/pudding

Your nav might looks like this:

Home | Organic Bananas | Shop | Blog | Contact

• Recipes

• Smoothies

• Pudding

If you simply must be 'flat', you can do this:

• evananas.com/organic-banana-recipes
• evananas.com/organic-banana-benefits

Your nav may look like this:

Home | Organic Bananas | Recipes | Benefits | Freeky Good | Blog | Shop | Contact

Personally, I like the taxonomy approach - but within reason. Both have their benefits, but I think the taxonomy approach gives you a little more room to grow.

Home | Organic Bananas | Organic Berries | Shop | Blog | Contact

• Recipes

• Smoothies

• Pudding

Say you want to get into the organic berry market later?

[TakeshiYoung]

If this is an existing site, I would not change the URL structure just to include some keywords in there. The benefits of having a few keywords in the URL are outweighed by the risks. Even for a new site, shorter is typically better, like you said.

If you have a really large site with distinct categories, then having subdirectories makes sense. I would use dashes instead of underscores:

• evananas.com/organic-bananas/recipes
• evananas.com/non-organic-bananas/recipes
• evananas.com/plantains/recipes

Otherwise, just include the keywords in the page itself rather than creating a subdirectory just so your can have keywords in there:

• evananas.com/organic-banana-recipes
• evananas.com/organic-banana-benefits

[HashtagHustler]

Thank you both!

I would tend to agree with you about not rewriting my url's however we are redoing the website 100% and the website is in terrible shape. The previous seo guy tried to do what I am attempting to do, but to such a degree that a url would look like.

evananas.com/bannana/bannanas/organic/organic-bananas/recipes/cooking-at-home-with-bananas

literally.....

In that case would you consider doing a rewrite with a 301?

[Travis_Bailey]

If those pages are getting traffic or have good links/referrals, then sure, redirect to the appropriate page.

What 'good' means really depends upon the vertical, but you know what pages get traffic and which are chaff.

Check your various link sources and site analytics.

Whatever doesn't make your cut, 410. Whatever makes the cut, 301 to a page with content relevant to the old page. Don't do a blanket (all old pages redirect to evananas.com) redirect. It's also a very good idea to consider responsive design, now that GWT is getting angry about improper mobile redirects.