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View Full Version : URLs: Words or Codes? Is one REALLY better?


KimESP
08-21-2006, 04:29 PM
Hi, I'm new on this forum, but I've got SOME SEO experience. I've got a few very specific questions about some SEO changes I want to be making to my website: http://www.EatStayPlay.com

First off, my traffic is okay, but I'm looking to get from 1,000 visitors a day to about 5,000 with a 20% monthly growth.

I have about 20,000 pages on the site (which you won't be able to see until I re-do the navigation) I'm NOT interested in changing how I maintain the pages (generated from a database and XML)

I do NOT have a small set of keywords that I am targeting. I want to be listed top page for searches like "(the name of a city) (state) camping" Ex: "Prescott Arizona Camping" and for searches for a specific attraction's name ex: Katherines Landing

I am not looking for keywords like 'camping'. It's just too broad.

I am listed in all major search engines. We've been online since early 2004.

My products are selling membership to the website and selling eGuides. I offer information about outdoor recreation for 10 states and about 12,000+ attractions.

I do okay with buying placement on Google, but that can get spendy and is time consuming to manage.

I'm 100% about to rework the navigation of the site so I want to ask this question BEFORE I do it.

1. My page URLs are currenly in a code form. Is that okay when matched with a good meta title & desciption, acceptable meta keywords and targeted copy or would I be better changing the URLs to be words that match the content on the page?

I vote that the current urls are fine, but my business partner thinks they should be changed.

Example: http://www.eatstayplay.com/html/az/a325p011c2028.html
Is an example of my current url pattern. Which IS indexed in all search engines, but maybe not as high as it can be.

If we do change this to be words, how does that work? I don't want to have a folder for every page...

Thanks so much!

grnidone
08-21-2006, 04:51 PM
If your urls are being crawled, I'd leave them. You don't want to lose links you've already accumulated. Instead, I'd spend time getting deep links to your site. That will help you more than tweaking the urls.

That being said, If you *HAVE* to change the urls, I'd look at bringing it up a level in the directory structure.

Instead of:
http://www.eatstayplay.com/html/az/a325p011c2028.html

Change to:
http://www.eatstayplay.com/az/a325p011c2028.html

If you want to put keyterms in it, fine. Be sure you tweak your .htaccess file and have 301's to take care of the redirection.