How Important is it to Use Keywords in the URL

[wickerparadise]

I wanted to know how important this measure is on rankings.

For example if I have pages named  "chair.html"  or "sofa.html"

and I wanted to rank for the term seagrass chair or rattan sofa..

Should I start creating new pages with the targeted keywords "seagrass-chair.html" and just copy everything from the old page to the new and setup the 301 redirects??

Will this hurt my SEO rankings in the short term? I have over 40 pages I would have to rename and redirect if doing so would really help in the long run.

Appreciate your input.

[solvid]

Hi,

I would say that it is beneficial to have a clear architecture/structure for users and search engine spiders to navigate across your website. If you'd decide to change the structure, I would suggest using something like this: www.yourwebsite.com/chairs/seagrass-chair/.

When you say that you have a "chair" page, does that mean that all of your products are listed on that single page or do you have separate products pages?

[wickerparadise]

It is an ecommerce site (yahoo) so all the urls are wickerparadise.com/ (whatever the id of the page is called) .html

The page with all of the chairs would be "x-chairs" x being the specific type of chair.

I have a main category page: http://www.wickerparadise.com/seagrass.html

Now this page has everything in the seagrass furniture category. I believe we made a mistake in calling this seagrass.html vs. seagrass-furniture.html (since we want to rank high for seagrass furniture and this page has more content then a specific item page)

Should I go ahead with renaming the urls and doing the redirects on a massive scale (30+ at a time) ??

[solvid]

I've just checked your website, and it does look fine to me. You have a clear navigation and all of that. I wouldn't worry about changing URLs (Google would still index them) But just double check with search console if Google has indexed all of your pages.

In regards to the seagrass.html vs seagrass-furniture.html, I wouldn't  worry about changing it, because Google understands that your website is about selling furniture, therefore it realises that seagrass.html has to do with furniture. When you change your pages and put 301 redirects you loose a bit of link juice, so if I were you I wouldn't worry too much about your URL situation (it's a minor ranking factor)  and would focus on link building and on-site optimisation.

Hioe that helps

[BradsDeals]

I can definitely say that keywords in a URL can make a difference in a competitive vertical. We have an article on site with a slug of "best-place-to-buy-a-mac-online" and you get one guess what keywords it ranks for.

That said, if you're talking about changing URLs sitewide, I would be very cautious. Maybe make changes to one or two pages to start and watch them for a few weeks.