SEO Tip #24: Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking?
Matt Cutts: Truthfully I wouldn’t really obsess about it at that level of detail. It does help a little bit to have keywords in the URL. It doesn’t help so much that you should go stuffing a ton of keywords into your URL.
You know if there’s a convenient way that’s good for users where you have four or five keywords that might be worthwhile, but I wouldn’t obsess about it to that level of how deep is the URL in the path or how am I combining it?
For example, on my blog, when I do a post I’ll take the first four or five words or two or three words related to that post and I’ll use that as the URL. But you don’t need to make seven, eight, ten, twenty words because that just looks spammy to users and people will probably not click through as much in the first place.
So position is going to be a very, very second order kind of thing of keywords in the URLs. I would not worry about that so much as having great content that people want to link to and people want to find out about.
About the Author
Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.