Do the terms in a website url drive search hits

[Toal]

I've tried to do a search on a few key words that I knew was on my landing page and I couldn't get Google to find it.  So I thought maybe I needed to change my url to reflect a few the terms.

[NAHL-1430]

Hi Audrey,

There are all kinds of reasons why your landing pages may not be ranking for your keywords. When you say 'change my url' do you mean change the domain of the website (the bit in between the www. and the .com) or the part after the .com (.com/mylandingpage)?

Having the keywords in the the subdomain (the bit after the .com) can help, to a point, but as far as I'm aware having an exact match domain if that isn't the name of your business is a bit of a no-no nowadays.

John

[AGMContainerControls]

From my experience and reading from others both on Moz and in general they typically say to make sure your H1 matches closely to your url path so, if I am on the contacts page my H1 should be contacts. As far as if it ranks you better I believe it will come down to your content on your page and how well it represents the key word you are trying to optimize for.

[DonnaDuncan]

Your question is "do the terms in a website url drive search hits". The answer is yes, in part.

As John Rooney says, "There are all kinds of reasons why your landing pages may not be ranking for your keywords", more than 200 of them according to Google spokesperson Matt Cutts. (See time stamp 1:08).  Without knowing which page you're referencing it's hard to offer an opinion as to why you might not be able to find your page in Google search results.

I suggest you start with the Moz Beginners Guide to SEO. I apologize if I've incorrectly assumed you're new to SEO. I'm basing that on the nature of your question and the fact that your profile states you just recently joined the community.

If you have more, or more specific questions after that, please come back and ask again. There are lots of experienced folks that participate on this forum that can help you.

[Toal]

Thanks John.  Yes, it is the bit after the ".com".  I'm not necessarily trying to skew it, I'm trying to at least make it somewhat easy to find.  I always have the url bookmarked on my laptop but when I went to find the site on my phone, it wasn't easily coming up.  Thanks again!

[Toal]

Thanks Donna.  Yes, I am a newbee!  Thank you for the pointers.  The site I was trying to find using my mobile device was http://hortonworks.com/partners/microsoft-hybrid/

I used microsoft hybrid and hadoop hybrid as initial tries.

[Toal]

Forgive my newness but what does H1 stand for?

[DonnaDuncan]

Cool.

Well take a look at Chapter 4, on-page optimization for some tips as to why that page might not be jumping out in search results. Neither keyword phrase - "microsoft hybrid" or "hadoop hybrid" - appears in all the right places. That's the place to start. Hortonworks has good domain authority (74).

[DonnaDuncan]

Header 1.

It's the main heading on the page. On the page you're referencing, the H1 tag contains "We Do Hadoop in the Cloud". Your H1 should contain the keyword phrase you're trying to rank for. There should only be 1 H1 on the page.