Nov 01
Why Using Keywords In Your URLs Is Important
Published by Amybeth (@researchgoddess) at 10:00 am under Blogging,Social,Twitter
I use a social network aggregation tool to track several keyword searches, both for personal and professional use. One of the search columns I have, naturally, is for the keyword “sourcecon“. I want to know who’s talking about it and referring to it so I can respond when it’s appropriate.
A couple of weeks ago, I started noticing some tweets showing up in my search columns that didn’t contain the search terms I set in place. They weren’t “retweets” from people whom I follow, so I was curious what was going on.
Sure, the word “sourcing” is in this tweet, but my search column in HootSuite is only looking for tweets with the word “sourcecon” in them. So I clicked on the shortened URL links and discovered what was happening: the original URL masked by the shortened URL above contains the word “sourcecon” -
Sweet. Even with a shortened URL, the search function in several social media aggregation tools will find your keywords in the original URL and allow them to show up in your search column. I tested this with HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Seesmic (three of the most commonly used tools), and all three of these will return tweets where your keyword is listed in the URL of a link.
In knowing this, it’s obvious how important it is to work keywords with which you want yourself or your company to be associated into your URLs. That way, when people run keyword searches in Twitter, your material will show up in their results. From a sourcing and/or employment branding standpoint, sticking keywords into your website URLs is a simple (and free) way to get your message distributed more widely.
Happy sourcing!
Keywords into URL is a very good idea and when our business goes live in a couple of weeks I will remember that.
It’s a shame, though, in a more “cosmic” sense that we have to do these things, that we have to compete on who is better at imbedding keywords than who is actually just better. Anyway, I think there is a way or are ways to identify the real quality of people, and select on something more meaningful than keywords. It’s what occupies my time.
Good tip Amybeth,
If you blog using WordPress, you can configure the urls of your posts by checking the appropriate Permalinks option. I think that what Glen (the post you highlighted) did.
Keep up the great work.
Best wishes
Hung
It’s good SEO and great for the reasons you’ve highlighted here.
I’ve been rethinking my own permalinks strategy. I’ve gone from the initial p=XXX setting when I first set up my blogs to /%postname%/ after the domain name. With the end of the year approaching, I’m considering going back to /%YYYY%/%MM%/%postname%/ so that I can filter posts by year when I look at my analytics.
Thankfully I have the Redirection plug-in, which will help with some of this.