Quote:
Originally Posted by craigbrass  We went on advice from two SEO experts when building our software - Viper Cart. |
They obviously weren't very good experts, then. Keyword density is about proportionality; the higher the % of of hit words in a title, heading, description (etc) element, the better. So, to to truly optimise an article, it is intuitively more sensible to include only the tail category(s) in the URL. If you had five categories, such as;
Presales /> Purchasing and Licensing /> Payments /> [Article]
1) Most of the parent categories aren't optimal - they are general, by their very nature of being a
parent category. Therefore, intuitively the words in the upper most parent categories do not have a direct relation to the article, and as far as
SEO is concerned, are a waste of space.
2) The URL starts to become
too long from a usability perspective:
www.domain.com/support/knowledgebase/presales/purchasing-licensing/payments/payments-by-paypal - copy and pasting is a pain, e-mail spam filters weigh
against long URLs, etc.
3) Back onto
SEO, too
many words in the URL get weighted less, and
4) Prominent keywords get diluted (again, talking about proportionality).
Here it is from Google's search and spam lead himself:
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Matt Cutts Certainly. If you can make your title four- or five-words long - and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.
So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users - and not have it come across as keyword stuffing. |
So, it would make sense for us to ensure there is some cap on the length of the entire URL. We'll see; it has a number of design implications. Obviously, we will strip stop words and look at term stemming. We may end up going with the full trailing category slugs (stemmed or truncated), or just the tails - both have important design implications which may outweigh
SEO benefit. We are researching knowledgebase design and implementation considerations, and will make the choice that balances between
SEO, usability and
longevity.
It pays to understand science behind
SEO, as well as the art of it. I personally do not think that anyone is an
SEO 'expert' unless they can explain things like trustrank, LSI, TF-IDF matrices, fractal summarization etc.
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