Can't get my preferred URL, how much does it matter?
-
Hi guys.
I'm building a new site at the moment - seen a solid SEO opportunity for my work. I'm a producer engineer, specialising in mixing and mastering, so i'm creating a site for online mixing services.
After a bit of keyword research I decided that "online mixing" was the best, most relevant and high volume term to go for. Ideally i'd like my home page to be www.onlinemixing.com (or something similar) but alas! It's been taken, as well as all the variations (like switching words, hypens etc)
How much does this matter form an SEO point of view?
E.g - For the search term "online mixing" would - www.onlinemixing-signalchain.co.uk be much worse than -www.onlinemixing.co.uk? Or am I sweating the small stuff?
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Isaac.
-
Thanks so much guys, really helpful.
Will a 301 pass this "age trust", or any other trust factors? I'm moving over from a long establish domain, about 4 years old. It's a flash site though, so i want to convert to something more SEO friendly. Also how long does it take to gain trust?
Got some high quality backlinks (only about 20 but very relevant). The 301 will help pass the "link juice" right?
Cheers.
Isaac.
-
Agreed with the the last submission. The largest challenge for you to gain traction in rankings will be the age of the domain when compared to long-established businesses because of the trust factor.
http://searchengineland.com/ranking-the-seo-ranking-factors-10890
Best of Luck.
-
Hi
From an SEO point of view, Google reduce the important of keyword in the URL so having the keyword in the URL doesn't have as much of a factor as it once did. Again a lot of research and even Matt Cutts has confirmed its not as high as ranking factor as it once was.
I would never ever put a hyphen in the URL, there has been many tests show it does impact rankings (might have once been a whiteboard friday), but it not there have been multiple experiments, all showing that hypthen in the domain name is bad.
This is a must read, its a bit old (2007), but its very relevant http://moz.com/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name
Hope all this is useful
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is the URL Matching the Page Title Important?
Hello I have tried searching for an answer on this but I can't get a clear answer due to the results when searching for URL title. I have just launched our second Shopify site for one of our brands. My first site launched in 2014 but when I launched I didn't pay much heed to SEO for page titles, URLs, etc so have retrospectively fixed this over time. For my Shopify site just launching I want to get it as right as possible from the start (learning from mistakes). My question is regarding URLs and what my approach should be for better SEO. So, I have a page with a Title of Newton Leather Wallets, Purses, Card Holders & Glasses Cases and the URL is https://www.tumbleandhide.com/collections/newton-leather-wallets-card-holders It was my understanding that I should try and make the URL reflect the Page Title more accurately. The problem is that this takes the character count to 77. On other pages it can be in the 80s. Will the above link be better for SEO than say just https://www.tumbleandhide.com/collections/newton I am just wary of the URL's being too long as my Moz Site Crawl is returning a lot of URLs that are too long. Thanks in Advance.
On-Page Optimization | | lukegj0 -
How do I get my sitelinks to appear
Hi I have recently launched a new site and I was hoping for destination sitelinks to appear under my site as they do for my competitors' sites. I have submitted a sitemap but is there anything else I can do to expedite this process or guarantee the sitelinks appearing? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | CosiCrawley0 -
How much juice do you lose in a 301 redirect?
Our site has a number of, shall we say, unoptimized URLs. I would like to change the URLs to be more relevant; if a page is about red widgets, the URL should be www.domain.com/red-widgets.html, right? I'm getting resistance on this, however, based on the belief that you lose something significant when you 301 an old URL to a new one. Now, I know that if you have a long chain of redirects, the spiders will stop following at some point, and that is a huge problem. That wouldn't apply if there's only one step in the chain, however. I've also heard that you lose some link juice in a 301, but I'm unsure how serious that problem actually is. Is it small enough that we'd win out in the long run with better-optimized URLs?
On-Page Optimization | | CMC-SD0 -
Canonical URL tags help I am not sure what this is
I am trying to get an A grade on my webpage and this is one of the critical steps canonical URL tags I cant find much information as to what this even is never mind fixing it. Thanks I am a total newbe at this any advice is appreciated
On-Page Optimization | | gemfirez0 -
Duplicat page content issue I don't know how to solve
I've got a few pages (click here to see the fist on with the others as side bar links). They are all thumbnail pages of different products. The tiles are pretty different but the page content is virtually the same for all of them as is the meta description tag. I'm getting error's on the SEOmoz crawl for those pages. I know the meta tag shouldn't be a problem in SEO but is the content of the page going to cause me issues? Are the error messages from SEOmoz a result of the page content or the meta description? The pages are very similar but they are different enough that I want to separate them onto different pages. There would be too many links on that single page as well if all the thumbs where on the same page. Should I just ignore the error messages?
On-Page Optimization | | JAARON0 -
Which method should I use for my URL structure?
I have an existing site that is currently utilizing a structure that is like this: http://www.mysite.com/Ohio/City-of-Cleveland-PRODUCT-NAME Should I restructure it like: http://www.mysite.com/Ohio/City-of-Cleveland/Product-Name We are doing very well with very specific searches already but are sometimes coming in 2nd and 3rd place. For example: If I search for CLEVELAND PRODUCT NAME I always come up in the top three and about 60% of the time I am #1. I want to make it better. We have only launched in 4 states but plan on launching an additional 4 states over the next few weeks and I want to make sure we are building things properly. Any feedback would be wonderful. As usual, thanks everyone!! -Alex
On-Page Optimization | | dbuckles0 -
Numbers in URL's - Search friendly or not?
Hi Mozzers, I have a client who has just launched a new website and we are having difficulties in making the URL's search friendly. I wont get into the technical aspects, but I'll explain the potential solutions the developers have given me. current: www.site.com/en/product/browse-by-product/37/22 Where 'en' stands for the English version of the website, 37 is the product category for example 'hard drives', and 22 is the product name or example 'seagate' Option to fix; www.site.com/en/p/product/hard-drives-37/seagate-22 This optional fix reduces the word product down to p, reduces 'browse by product' to 'product' and inserts the category and product names. Note the category identifier '37' has to be included in the URL, and the product identifier '22' also has to be in the URL. Obviously this is not great, but it is required at the moment. Best case scenario would be to have the URL like this... www.site.com/en/hard-drives/seagate So my question is, how far off the best case scenario is the option to fix? Scale of 1 to 10 would be good?
On-Page Optimization | | JoeyDorrington0 -
Is it worth changing urls with underscores?
A few pages on one of my sites have underscores linking keywords rather than hyphens (keywords_and_keyword rather than keyword-and-keyword). Possibly from a time before I knew hyphens were preferred... One of the pages ranks well, and drives a good amount of traffic. The others do not do so well, but are still within the top 10 landing pages for the site. Is it worth me changing the underscores to hyphens (setting up 301 redirects first of course) or doesn't it make that much difference?
On-Page Optimization | | Jingo010