

Ask HN: Repeat or not keywords in URL for better SEO? - kikocherman

One example is: if I have the domain howto.com, and I want to rank for "how to drink", what's the best URL for the page?<p>howto.com/drink
howto.com/how-to-drink<p>Thanks for your help.
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rjau
Best would an Exact Match Domain (EMD): howtodrink.com. But if your site is
going to be about more than just drinking then its probably not recommended.

1\. howto.com/how-to-drink 2\. howto.com/drink

Number 1 will greatly out perform number 2 for the term 'how to drink'.

I have not seen repeating the keyword in the root and path have a negative
effect on seo.

Make 'How To Drink' the first three words of the <title> tag and you're making
a strong start.

~~~
kikocherman
Does anyone have something to add here or is it the consensus that he is
right?

Also, what's better, www, or non-www? What about using words like the, a, etc.
in the URL?

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AznHisoka
It probably makes very very little difference in terms of ranking. In terms of
click-through, it probably makes more of a difference.. as long as you have a
friendly URL that looks clean, and has the keyword.

So you want /how-to-drink, NOT /article/123131 and definitely not
/sasdabasd2312121.asp

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leejw00t354
One thing I would add is I'm not sure how great search engines are at decoding
domain names into keywords. I mean some search engines might understand
howto.com would relate to the keywords "how to" but some might just read it as
"howto".

Because of that I'd say go for howto.com/how-to-drink.

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ianpurton
I think you'd be better off with

howto.com/how-to-drink

I can't imagine the search engines giving you a boost because you've repeated
keywords in the link.

I would be more concerned about how you'll get anyone to link to your
articles.

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gesman
I'd use: \- howto.com/drink URL for category related to all drink-related
articles, with anchor-rich links to other articles

\- howto.com/how-to-drink for specific article on how to drink.

Gleb

