Most people forget about their URL when considering SEO.  The URL is important for SEO and your business.  Let’s take a PPC sidetrack for moment.

Lessons from PPC

Many of your courses on CPA and Affiliate Marketing will include sections on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising using Google AdWords, Yahoo, and MSN AdCenter.  The course will include tips and techniques for writing “killer” adcopy.  When it is all said and done many of them will recommend that beginners simply find the ad in the #1 or #2 spot (for their chosen keyword) and track it for a little while.  If that ad remains in the #1 or #2 spot for very long then it is making money and the ad network likes the ad.  So these courses typically recommend copying the ad and making minor tweaks to it.  Then run the tweaked version as your own.

What is the 1 thing in your adcopy no one else can copy?  Your display URL.  The display URL may be the only differentiator between you and your nearest competitor.

How does this apply to SEO?

There are a lot of unscrupulous people doing business on the web.  Google will ignore content on their site which has already been indexed somewhere else.  However, this doesn’t keep those people from copying your content and posting it on a Web 2.0 property with a link back to their site (for SEO purposes).

Also, remember that using someone else’s content and putting your own spin on it is a perfectly legitimate way to create “new” content.  This is something that people have done outside the internet for a long time.  Google requires that at least 50% of the content be unique for the page to be considered truly unique and index worthy.  It is a very common practice to take someone else’s good idea, re-write it, and post it on article site for SEO building backlinks.

Having your niche primary keywords in your URL helps your overall SEO.  Having the primary keyword of a given page in its URL helps the SEO of that page.  Having both will help you maintain an identity online and help you outrank the leaches.

URL Structure: SEO Mistakes to Avoid at all Costs

Here’s a list of what you should avoid at all costs:

1. Generic page names like “page1.html”

• This hurts Google’s ability to properly classify your page and it’s primary keyword

1. Deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html”

• This makes it difficult for users to direct link to your page or find it again at a later date

1. Directory names that have no relation to the content in them

• This makes it difficult for users to direct link to your page or find it again at a later date

1. Pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. “domain.com/page.htm” and “sub.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content

• This will get you a duplicate content penalty from Google – some sites will post the same page a thousand times to try and look like a bigger site and create internal links to the home page to generate a high page rank

URL Structure: Mistakes that are minor

Lesser sins:

1. Using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs

• Most SEO experts will tell you avoid this and I’m sure they are correct, however, the default install of any mediawiki (the engine for Wikipedia) uses URLs with parameters in them and many dynamic sites use parameters and session IDs – it can’t be that bad

1. Mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure

• This can get you a duplicate content penalty which is definitely bad for SEO but it gets you the duplicate content penalty because Google sees the www version as a separate and distinct page from the non-www version of the URL.  This means you get the duplicate content penalty and the backlinks to your site/page are viewed as more than one which dilutes the effect of those backlinks.  Use a 301 permanent redirect for either the www or non-www version of your site so every link is directed properly and Google sees only one page and not two.

1. Using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better)

• I will often capitalize the first letter of each word in a URL – WorkAtHomeTrek.com – because I think it helps the user remember the URL, especially when the URL doesn’t have dashes between the words.  However, odd capitalization can hurt the user’s ability to remember your URL – this in turn lessens the chances they will correctly post a backlink on another site for you.