The Importance of Key Phrase Placement within URLs

When optimising a site for search, considerations should be made not only to the content on the page itself, but also the structure of that page and even the text that appears within the URL.

Search engines favour a clean, folder structure URL that is not too long using text that relates to the content it represents, and that is where the importance of key phrase placement within the URL comes into play.

Search engines index the URL of each page, and pay a certain amount of attention to the text within that URL, and for that reason, it is beneficial to use key phrases when naming the site files and folders.

For this reason, we have implemented a change in the URL structure for the ski insurance section on the Travel Insurance Direct website. Travel Insurance Direct provide a wide range of ski insurance offerings, and it was identified that the URLs within the ski section of the site could be further enhanced to improve the performance for search, and increase the site from a usability perspective.

By renaming the containing folder for the ski section from ‘ski’ to ‘ski-insurance’, we are better describing the content for search engines and users, a change that does affect search results and also improves usability.

A typical URL within the ski section on Travel Insurance Direct is now written as:

http://www.travel-insurance.net/ski-insurance/ski-travel-insurance.htm

To implement these changes, we amended every internal link to the ski insurance section on the Travel Insurance Direct website and permanently redirected the previous URLs to the new structured URLs to remove any duplicate content and correctly resolve firstly the content for search engine spiders and secondly any incoming links that point to the old URLs.

It will be interesting to monitor the impact this has on the ski related terms on the Travel Insurance Direct website.