There is a very simple answer to the question - a big bold YES. As a quick on page SEO trick optimised URLs can drastically improve your rankings in a very achievable way for anybody with the most basic of web design knowledge. I would go as far as saying I can’t think of an easier way of improving your ranking with search engines than URL SEO.

23.01.2015: I have been repeatedly advised that page titles are a stronger contributor to page rank than a URL - which is one thing I am trying to determine with this case study. To test this I have changed the URL of my original blog post to:

http://www.optimise-u.co.uk/on-page

This is still a relevant URL but will it affect my positioning? To speed my page getting re-indexed I am using the ‘Fetch as Google’ tool.

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog called “Indexability for on page SEO“. Yesterday I found it was ranking position one on Google for “optimise indexabilty”, “optimise indexabilty SEO” and a few other long tail keywords. This reinforces what the last section of the blog entry explains - a well optimised URL can make a web page rank well on search engines.

My goal in creating this blog was to find SEO best practices through research on my own analytics. I want to make this post look further into how something as simple as URL SEO and getting the right title in place can give your SEO a huge kick and get you ranking high on Google ignoring most external factors.

I have decided that I want this page to rank number 1 for the phrase “optimise URL” and this blog explores how I will achieve this. The blog also explores Google’s keyword planner tool and how you can choose good URLs yourself. My secondary goal is to rank highly for “URL SEO” and I will keep this entry updated with my progress. If you are interested in seeing how this case study plays out please follow my social media for regular updates - links on the right of the page.

Currently this page deliberately has not got very relevant ALT tags. Also I was careful to only get backlinks from forums which Google has previously said aren’t a bonus to SEO link usual backlinks are.

Potential Issues With Existing Case Studies

06.02.2015: On sharing this study with the outside world I got slated pretty quickly by people saying “it is your page titles which are giving you the ranking” and “page titles are a stronger ranking factor than URLs”. Looking at why people were of this opinion took me to other existing case studies with one thing in common. Thousands of keywords are searched with a goal of finding averages of what is getting who ranking where.

The particular case study - search metrics’ - is excellent. But it is not doing what this blog is doing which is taking a page and building up to see what factors get SEO moving. This doesn’t take into account if you already have a brand that people recognise you will have great off page SEO and keywords in the URL aren’t needed.

In order to deal with some people’s complaints that I was going over old ground I changed the URL of my indexability post to /on-page and I found my ranking for the term ‘on page indexability’ moved up two rankings in two days to position #3 and is now occupying position #2.

Now the page title doesn’t have the keyword optimise in it and the page URL doesn’t have the keyword indexability. It is still occupying the first position for optimise indexability. This proves that a well thought out URL is a VERY strong ranking factor as changing it caused a rapid movement upwards in search ranking. This gives a new direction forward - removing the word optimise from this pages title.

In order to properly test if removing the keyword ‘optimise’ from my title negatively effects this pages SEO I need to wait and see if this additional four paragraphs has had any impact on my current ranking so watch this space.

How Optimising My URL Gave Me Instant SEO

When I say instant I mean that it went from not ranking at all straight to position 1 on Google without crawling up the listings. This is interesting because from a traditional SEO point of view while the on page optimisation is good, there is no real off page optimisation whatsoever at this point in time.

The page itself currently has no backlinks - inbound links that Google will follow. Having quality backlinks is one of the main external factors which helps websites rank highly on Google. My blog has been live for two weeks and time is another factor which makes the main search engines find a website reliable. It is safe to say while the page itself is well optimised, there is no huge marker telling Google to rank the page so well other than the URL - and the page title:

http://www.optimise-u.co.uk/indexabilty

These keywords are used reasonably throughout the text and the title tags meaning there is nothing on the page to say that it is irrelevant, however it is highly unlikely that if the URL didn’t have the two main keywords in it then I wouldn’t rank as high. To put it simply, optimising your URL for SEO can give near instant page rank results.

Using The Keyword Planning Tool

Before you write your web page you want to know exactly what keywords to target in your URL, title and content. This will give you good on page SEO by keeping everything relevant.

Google has what is known as the keyword planning tool. It is more aimed at pay per click marketing but does give good estimations of traffic and keyword ideas. First sign into the tool with your Google account. You will be taken to the page shown above in figure 1 (above). When the box is expanded it looks like this:

Search for keyword idea’s relating to the landing page you are trying to optimise. It is best to keep this simple. For this page I chose “URL SEO”. Google creates you keyword ideas on the next page broken into groups:

From this page I can see that SEO URL is searched on Google roughly 880 times per month and also has low competition so not so many people target this keyword. This means that making a optimised URL for your landing page is more likely to have a much heavier effect on your search rankings.

Planning Your URL

So now you have to think about how you can target the page you are writing to rank for the chosen search term. First think of the title. Reading this far it is clear that what I am trying to do is show that URLs are vital for SEO and this is very close to the keyword I am targeting “SEO URL” (and “optimise URL“). I chose “URL SEO - How to Improve Rankings” - so my target search term is right at the front of my title tag, and my URL and title already includes the term optimise.

This is where the planning part becomes vital. If a lot of people link to me with the anchor text ‘URL SEO’ describing the link it will look like a deliberate campaign to link build. Google’s penguin update penalises exact match anchor text for this reason. URL SEO isn’t likely to be used as anchor text - people often use the page title - but if I were targeting “keyword planning for SEO” and made my URL suffix ‘/keyword-planning-seo‘ and my page title ‘keyword planning for SEO‘ this would be most likely what people would put in their anchor text - which would slowly negatively affect the off site seo of this page.

This is the issue with the existing case studies mentioned earlier, as they aren’t measuring whether there are any other factors which might be negatively effecting the SEO of the page. For example a huge firm will have good off page SEO and is likely to not need to include keywords in their URL. A small firm will have less good off page SEO so are more likely to include keywords into their URL but are still also less likely to rank highly for competitive terms.

Your domain name with your title tags give most weight to your on page SEO ranking with Google, and the earlier the suffix is in the URL the more relevant Google finds it. If I were to make the URL on this page:

http://www.optimise-u/url

I could be fairly certain that within two weeks I would appear for the term “optimise URL” however in the long run this wouldn’t be hugely beneficial as it isn’t a often used search term. Instead using the keyword planner I chose:

optimise-u.co.uk/url-seo

Hopefully this will give me a good listing for both of my targeted keywords.

Optimising URLs on Low Ranking Pages

Lets say I have a page which either isn’t ranking where I want it on Google, or just isn’t showing at all. You can input the page URL into the Google keyword tool and then choose keywords to target in your URL. If you have a lot of backlinks I would strongly advise against this because it will create broken links, but you can use what you have learned from the keyword tool to edit the page and make it more relevant.

So with this information I could do one of two things. Firstly I could change the URL of the page to /best-landing-pages.

This would mean that any inbound links to the page would break and this can potentially damage your SEO, but if the page is fairly new and has no backlinks it could be worth doing to improve the rankings or target a higher traffic or lower competition keyword. Alternatively I could change on page factors to make the page more relevant - rewrite the title, and text so it is more relevant to these search terms.

Conclusion and Updates

So there you have it. I have my plan laid out and will check back daily to update you on how I am progressing with my two target keywords. I will also go deeper into how to use the keyword planning tool and see if the advice in this blog can get me ranking position 1 for “optimise keywords”. I will say one more time though - your URL is your most powerful tool. If you haven’t got a website yet and you are thinking of making one think long and hard about how your domain name will help your SEO.

26.01.2013 - Changing the URL didn’t cause my rankings to come crashing down which was predictable. The keyword optimise is part of my URL and that can’t be changed. What this did achieve was that I am now ranking position 3 for ‘indexability on page’. The title is certainly a strong ranking factor - as explained above.

To test what effect improving the relevance of my title tag I have updated this for the case study and will see what this does to my positioning.