Should You Use Targeted Keywords in URLs?

As you know, search engine algorithms look at over 100 criteria. If you read forums about Search Engine Optimization, you will see that some SEOs recommend to use keywords in URLs and others claim it is useless. The problem is that no one has made a real test (or they have not published it). We have decided to run some tests in order to make sure that words in URLs are criteria for search engines algorithms. Below are the tests we made As we were only focused on one item (keyword in URL), we have decided:

To create webpages with the same look and feel of our other webpages

To create webpages with the "word" rkpatjfg in the URL (directories and file names)

To avoid the word rkpatjfg in the body text and head text of these pages

To link to these new pages without using the word rkpatjfg in the anchor text Before we started our test, we searched for rkpatjfg in Google, MSN beta, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Teoma, WiseNut, Exalead (AOL.fr) and Voila. There were no results on these search engines. A few days later, Google, MSN beta and Exalead indexed our new web pages. Yahoo! also indexed one of them. So we did the same search for rkpatjfg on these search engines. Results See all the results in our Conclusions
- This test shows that keywords in URLs are taken into account by Google, MSN (beta), Yahoo! and Exalead algorithms.
- This test does not show how much it helps your ranking compared to other criteria.
- When constructing a URL directory and URL file names, use targeted and relevant keywords.
- If you use several keywords in your URLs, use hyphens as dividers and not underscores. Read our article about Agent Web Ranking
- analysing the web robots on your site
- Les moteurs tiennent-ils comptent des mots dans les URL ? Olivier Duffez is an SEO consultant specialized on Google. Working on the Internet since 1997, he created in 2002 Web Rank Expert. He created an book about Google and SEO in 2004. He's also part of the developpment team of Agent Web Ranking softwares.