Help writing a particular URL slug

[TheaterMania]

Hello, I work for an Theater news site.

We've drafted an interview piece where three actors (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom, Jr, and Karen Olivo) discuss their participation in an upcoming show (tick, tick... BOOM), which is an autobiographical precursor to Jonathan Larson's hit Broadway musical, Rent. The show is playing for five days in the New York City Center's 'Encores' musical theater series event.

In the interview, the actors widely discuss Mr. Larson's impact on the theater community, who passed away suddenly in 2001. As you might imagine, the most popular keywords on Google trends are of Mr. Larson, the show name, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, a tony-winning composer.

We're considering slugs that represent several permutations of the above actor + show combinations (below), but we're struggling trying to balance a slug that appropriately explains the article, uses appropriate keywords, and limit them (to a count of 5, per google's recommendation).

Any suggestions?

miranda-olivo-odom-inside-tick-tick-boomlin-manuel-olivo-odom-inside-tick-tick-boomtick-tick-boom-encores-interviewjonathan-larson-tick-tick-boom-at-encores

[randfish]

OK first off, let me just say that wow, that sounds like an awesome job and a thrilling industry to work in! Getting to interview Broadway musical actors is just super cool Congrats!

Now on to the SEO... The URL itself likely isn't too much of a concern. It's a very minor element in the overall scheme of things. That said, I'd be thinking about how it might potentially be used as link anchor text (if folks, for example, cut and paste the URL without ascribing specific new anchor text - in which case the URL itself becomes the anchor). My suggestion would thus be to think about the 3-4 phrases you want searchers to type in to reach this specific page. The page is very unlikely to rank for specific actor, writer, or composer names, but it might well rank for something related to combinations of the show name and actor names.

For example, if someone searched for "leslie odom tick tick boom" in Google, you might have a good shot at ranking. If they searched for "tick tick boom" or for "leslie odom" or for "jonathan larson" the page almost certainly wouldn't rank. Thus, I'd urge you to find the combination of name(s) + show title that is likely to drive the most traffic. That may actually be something broader like /tick-tick-boom-actors-interviewed. In that scenario, anyone searching for tick tick boom interviews or tick tick boom actors broadly could see the slug and suspect it's the right one (and Google could, too). Using only a single actor's name might be limiting.

Hope that helps! For more on URL structuring, check out http://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls (it's old but still very relevant).

[David-Kley]

If it isn't too much work for your staff, I would consider branching off into individual actors interviews, instead of grouping them into one long page. This will allow for better optimization on each page, and better usability for traffic, since they dont have to scroll through a huge page with many interviews. At the bottom of each, have a link that allows users to access the next interview easily. This way, you are focusing on a wider scope of keywords, have multiple opportunities for rankings, and can set up a top-level menu item based around the event with links to the internal pages.

Something like:

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom -- landing page

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom/interviews

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom/interviews/actors_names

By using this method you also will have multiple opportunities for social sharing, since you have an increased number of pages each with their own share links.

Hope this helps!

[TheaterMania]

David, thanks for your insight (you too Rand!).

Any chance I could email / call you directly to discuss the idea? There are some implementation issues we'd need to address on our site to be able to incorporate a system like this.