Domain development and local seo

Domain name SEO Week 2: Clean URLs and internal links

In the second week of my new domain name seo posts I am going to look at an area of search engine optimisation which has been quite involving of late for one of my domain development projects. Keeping your URLs clean and utilising internal links within your site can greatly improve search engine optimisation and ultimately the search engine ranking of individual pages.

Clean URLS:

I recently wrote a post entitled Domain Name Videos; the perfect example of using a clean URL structure. I created the post at http://www.3ac.co.uk/domain-name-videos (note it matches the title of the post.) Now, this may be a controversial comment, and I’m not sure if all SEO experts will agree with me, but I find that using hyphens between the words in the URL e.g. domain-name-videos; works much better from a search engine ranking point of view than either domainnamevideos or domain_name_videos.

You’ll often find that website owners do not pay enough attention to the individual URLs of their websites’ pages. Many a time you’ll see in the SERPs (search engine results pages) websites which have something like http://www.crapwebsite.com/388-nbu9d2342/domainvideo23042008.hmtl and to be honest it does looks crap.

Keep it clean! If you are targeting a particular key word / phrase include it in the URL.

3ac is currently top for “domain name videos” on Google see below:

Now it’s not just as simple as using the keywords in the title and having a clean URL to rank top, you then have give the page some authority making it appear relevant enough for the search engines to rank it highly. Almost as important as building inbound links from external websites, is drawing on the authority of existing pages on your website to help boost the SERPs of new pages.

This brings me nicely onto internal links.

Internal links:

I will continue to use my Domain Name Videos post as the example… and there we have it a straight forward internal link, right before your very eyes. You will notice that I have structured the link as a text link directly to the URL http://www.3ac.co.uk/domain-name-videos. As far as the search engines are concerned this is a link labeled as domain name videos, from a page about domain name videos, to a page about domain name videos. All boxes have been ticked for relevancy and more importantly it has been implemented cleanly, easy for the search engine spiders/robots to follow and index accordingly.

There we go a nice a simple post on the importance of keeping your URLs clean and creating internal links, the right way!

I hope you enjoyed it, until next time…

Cheerio!

Gary

Tags: Domain Name SEO, domain name videos, Domain Names, Domains (2009 Archive), link building, seo