You have heard me talk about not diluting your keywords previously. The idea being that if you target too many keywords in a given page then you will dilute the strength of any one of those keywords. And the same thing goes with keywords in the title tag, you should only use two keywords and minimize the other characters. Just look at my homepage title tag:
<title>Organic SEO Consultant | Professional SEO Consultant</title>
As of today I am ranking #1 & 2 for Organic SEO Consultant and #1 for Professional SEO Consultant if that tells you anything!
Well the same holds true for your URLs, you should not have too many words in them. In fact Matt Cutts has noted that any more than 5 words in a URL starts to dilute the weight.
[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.
So I would advise against using more than 3-5 words in your URLs. It all really boils down to not being greedy. If you try to keyword stuff Google will not like it and they have added measures over the years to combat keyword stuffing. And to boot, there has been recent study that shows short URLs get clicked on twice as much as long URLs! And there you have it, a double whammy, Google does not like long URLs and neither do users.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I recently put up a website and think the URL might be too long.. However I have already spent time submitting my site to a good deal of search engines and directories. If I changed my URL would I have to re-submit all of that information and would it be worth the transition?
Tknox, I think that your domain is OK because it is descriptive. But if you did want to change it you would need to 301 redirect the current domain to whatever the new one will be. That way you will pass any link authority that you have built up and you do not have to worry about the directories.
Thanks for the information. I have been writing my own post on this subject and your information was most useful