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~~~High Rankings Advisor - Issue No. 218~~~

Your Host: Jill Whalen [jill@highrankings.com]

________________________________________________________

~~~IN TODAY'S ADVISOR~~~

*Search Engine Marketing:
----> Changing URLs

*This Week's Sponsors:
----> Successful PPC Ads
----> KeywordDiscovery

*Stuff You Might Like:
----> Market Motive Online Marketing Membership Site

*High Rankings Forum Thread of the Week:
----> Changing Homepage URL

*Advisor Wrap-up:
----> Upcoming Conferences
________________________________________________________

~~~Introductory Comments~~~

Hey everyone! Today I've got an article about changing your URLs as well as
an awesome review from Jesse on the new membership site, Market Motive.

Enjoy! - Jill


~~~Search Engine Marketing Issues~~~

++Changing URLs++

Hey Jill,

I am in the process of changing all my URLs from things like news123.html to
OurCompany_Announces_New_CEO.html

Are there any problems associated with these wholesale changes, apart from
making sure to have a redirect for external inks?

Please let me know.

Thanks,

Lorenz

++Jill's Response++

Hi Lorenz,

I would highly recommend *not* changing your URLs at all. It is a common
misconception that keywords in URLs are somehow helpful to search engine
rankings, when in reality, they have very little (if any) effect on
rankings.

The reasons why people believe they help rankings are many, but generally
center on a mixing up of cause and effect, as many people learning about SEO
are apt to do.

For instance, when you do a keyword phrase search at Google, you will see
your keywords bolded on the search engine results page, including keywords
that appear in the URLs. People see this and assume that it means Google
factors the bolded words into their relevancy algorithms. Yet, the software
that does the bolding is just that -- software that is programmed to bold
the queried words that show up in the listings. It's a huge leap to think
that the bold type has anything to do with Google's actual algorithm.

Another reason why people wrongly assume that keyword phrases in URLs are a
factor in getting a page to show up in the search results is because the top
results do indeed often use keyworded URLs! But (and this is a big but)
websites that use keyword-rich URLs are using them because someone,
somewhere is attempting to optimize the pages to show up in the search
results -- which means they are doing a lot more than simply putting
keywords in URLs as part of their website optimization. Very rarely will
you see a page show up in the search results if the only place the keyword
phrase appears is the URL. Most likely the phrase is also being used in the
Title tag and other visible places on the page. So again, there's a mixing
up of cause and effect.

What has happened over the years is that the mixer-uppers have spread the
word that keywords in URLs will help with rankings, so others believe it and
make changes to their own URLs, making more and more keyword-rich URLs
appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Which, of course, feeds
the myth-monster even more!

All that said, this is somewhat of a tricky one to prove one way or another,
and it certainly doesn't hurt to use keyword-rich URLs when building a new
website. It often makes it easier to remember the URL, which is why on our
new High Rankings site most of our URLs will have keywords. It's not for SEO
purposes, but for usability purposes. If we didn't have to change our URLs
due to switching backend platforms, we definitely wouldn't go changing to
keyword-rich file names. But since we had to change them anyhow, I figured
we could use our site as a test bed to see what happens when you change
URLs. (And yes, I realize we could have done some complicated things behind
the scenes to continue to keep our URLs the same as they were, but in this
case, we felt changing them and redirecting was our best solution.
Especially as I can probably get a few good articles out of it later!)

I can't stress enough that you should never change URLs simply for SEO
purposes. But if you do have to change them, and you do want to eke out any
possible search engine benefit that you might get, then you should not use
underscores between the words, but hyphens instead. Even though Google
recently announced that they were going to start reading underscores as a
word separator, traditionally they haven't. They do read hyphens as a
separator, however. So if Google decides to use URLs to rank pages, then
you'd want to at least create them in a way they can read. You would also
not want to put two words together like "twowords.html" as they don't
separate words that are mashed together that way either.

Where you may benefit from a keyword-rich URL that has its words separated
by a hyphen is when another site links to your page by using just the URL
because it becomes somewhat of a keyword-rich anchor text link. For example,
if someone links to your page with this URL
www.example.com/keyword1-keyword2 (instead of using traditional anchor text)
you'd still have keyword1-keyword2 as part of the anchor text, which does
tell the search engines that the page they're about to go to is at least
somewhat relevant to those keyword phrases.

So in answer to the original question, instead of changing the existing
URLs, make sure you've optimized the page elements that do matter --
especially the Title tag, the anchor text pointing to that page, and the
words on the actual page itself -- and don't worry about the URLs. Changing
them can lose any "age equity" that you may have built up with your old
URLs, with minimal (if any) effect on rankings.

If after all this you still feel the need to change them, be sure to put
301-redirects in place from the old URLs to the new, and use hyphens rather
than underscores.

Hope this helps!

Jill


Share your comments and thoughts here:


(P.S. If anyone would like to republish the above Q&A article, please email
me your request and where it will reside, and I'll send you a short bio you
can use with it for your site.)


____________ Successful PPC Ads_____________________adv.

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__________________________________________________

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PPC ads. Real-world case studies.

Dozens of examples. Plus lists, charts, and techniques from SEO
copywriter Karon Thackston that help you squeeze more message
into less space.

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Check out the PowerPack Option that Karon is selling as well!
__________________________________________________


~~~Stuff You Might Like~~~

++Market Motive Online Marketing Membership Site++

Market Motive is a new, subscription-based website which brings together
some of the top minds in the Internet marketing world to teach you SEO, Web
analytics, PPC, social media, online publicity, and more. It was founded by
Web analytics pioneers Michael Stebbins and John Marshall, both formerly
from ClickTracks, as well as Avinash Kaushik, a web analytics guru and
author of "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day." Their goal is to provide their
members with advice, tutorials, and how-to's in order to gain a competitive
advantage through online marketing.

To reach that goal, Market Motive has assembled a dream-team faculty which
includes some of the most well known and experienced Internet marketing
minds: Todd Malicoat (Stuntdbl), an SEO and link-building consultant; Greg
Jarboe and Jamie O'Donnell (SEO-PR), pioneers and leading authorities on
online publicity; Bryan Eisenberg (Future Now), a leading expert on online
marketing and conversion optimization; Matt Bailey (Site Logic), a social
media and analytics expert; and Alan Rimm Kaufmann (Rimm Kaufmann Group), a
leading authority on PPC.

As a Market Motive subscriber, these experts are fully at your disposal via
fresh training videos, conference calls and lively Q&A discussions.

The self-guided teaching section of the site is divided into two main areas:
knowledge and discussion. The knowledge area contains curricula for a
variety of Internet marketing disciplines including SEO, paid search, web
analytics, social media, conversion optimization, and online publicity. Each
discipline's curriculum is broken down into a variety of sub-topics that,
when combined, give you the big picture. Each curriculum contains training
videos that are uploaded on a frequent basis as well as occasional
conference calls that you can attend and participate in. So far, I've
participated in two conference calls and really liked that questions were
answered in real-time.

The videos are great and they give you insights that you can't find anywhere
else -- straight from industry experts. I particularly find real-world
examples and application of principles very helpful when applied to real
websites and situations. Generic videos and information can be found in many
other places online, but it's rare to have so many experts providing unique,
custom insights with how-to examples all in one place, which really makes
this site stand out.

In the discussion area, you can post questions for the experts to answer and
provide personalized help. I've not seen anywhere else you can get this type
of help for a variety of different business problems all in one place. This
area is where the site truly shines, as it creates a great interaction
between the members and the faculty. I have already had some good
discussions with the faculty and they have always replied to me in a timely
manner.

With all that said, Market Motive is a members-only site, and at $299 per
month it is not cheap. For a business, $299/month isn't a huge expense;
however, for an individual or solo entrepreneur, the membership fee isn't
exactly pocket change. If I were on my own, I would have a hard time coming
up with $299/month to join, even though I see the value of it. However,
anyone or any business that wants to gain invaluable knowledge about their
website's traffic, conversion, search ranking, profitability, etc., should
really consider a membership. There's so much more here than you get at the
cheaper members-only websites.

My first reaction upon navigating the site was that it's like an Internet
marketing college with highly respected and trusted experts teaching. That
in and of itself is why I feel that the $299 can be justified to just about
anyone in any business setting. Being able to tap the minds of experts who
have years of battle-tested experience is worth a lot more than $299 per
month when you think about the return on investment you will receive when
your new-found knowledge is put into action on your own site or those of
your clients.

I have truly enjoyed the site thus far, and feel that it is extremely
worthwhile to any Internet Marketer. The company is just starting out, and
I'm sure they have only scratched the surface of where they plan to go with
it. I truly think that people will benefit immensely from the knowledge and
insight that can be gained by joining this site.

In fact, I'm off to watch some videos on Internal Site Search Analysis!

Jesse DaCosta
SEO Associate, High Rankings
www.highrankings.com


[Jill's comments: When I sent Jesse's review to Marketing Motive to make
sure we were accurately depicting their membership site, Michael Stebbins
generously offered $200 off the first month's subscription for the first 500
High Rankings subscribers who sign up by December 16, 2007! Simply use the
discount code of HRA_MM200 when you sign up and $200 will be deducted during
the checkout process. That makes your first month only $99 so that you can
thoroughly review it and make sure what they offer is what you're interested
in. (I think even Jesse would be willing to pay that much ;)

Here's our affiliate link to learn more or sign up:
.

Let us know how you like it! - Jill ]


______________KeywordDiscovery_____________________adv.

Keyword Research Tool That Totally Rocks!
__________________________________________________

"KeywordDiscovery is my keyword research tool of choice!

"We've been using it for the past few years now, and our clients
are truly benefiting from the additional terms we're finding that
may otherwise have been missed.

"It's always great to be able to recommend helpful tools like
KeywordDiscovery to our High Rankings Forum members,
newsletter subscribers, and High Rankings seminar attendees!"
- Jill Whalen


__________________________________________________


~~~High Rankings Forum Thread of the Week~~~

++Changing Homepage URL++

For those looking for some advanced SEO info, we have a ton of it in our
"Technobabble" area of the forum:
. There's tons of
great info on dynamic sites, as well as mountains of technical info on
redirects, mod_rewrites, etc.

An interesting one this week came from forum member "star1" whose homepage
URL had to change for technical reasons.

Read the forum post and responses here:
.


~~~Advisor Wrap-up~~~

That's all for today!

Next week is WebmasterWorld's PubCon in Vegas where I'll be speaking. If
you're planning to attend, please feel free to introduce yourself. I love
meeting HRA subscribers! I'm speaking on the SEO 101 panel as well as the
SEO Copywriting one. There's more info here: .

Also, for those of you who like to plan ahead, I'll also be speaking at
Danny Sullivan's SMX West Conference in Santa Clara, CA on Feb. 26-28, 2008.
Get a jump on registration and the early-bird price by signing up now via my
affiliate link: . (High Rankings affiliate
links help keep the High Rankings Advisor free, and it's appreciated when
you use them!)

Catch you in Vegas, baby! (Or in the next newsletter!) - Jill


Today's issue will be available in the archives at the following URL:
http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/

--
Please send all questions to mailto:newsletter@highrankings.com.

If you prefer RSS/XML please feel free to use our newsfeed here:
http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/feed/

I do send personal replies as time allows; however, I do not give out
individual site critiques for free. Please check out my various SEO
services if you're interested in a complete review of your site.

Visit the High Rankings Advisor website at
http://www.highrankings.com/advisor.htm
and don't forget to check out the High Rankings Search Engine Optimization
Forum at:
.

Best Regards,

Jill Whalen
http://www.highrankings.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The High Rankings Advisor is a free, biweekly email newsletter discussing
the latest news and information in the world of search engine marketing.

--
To ***/change profile:
http://www.listcast.com/x?u=66532938f-a6080fb6

To subscribe:
http://www.listcast.com/x?oid=18425d

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High Rankings® Advisor nor Jill Whalen take any responsibility for the
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Copyright 2007 High Rankings Advisor 116 Cochituate Rd.; Framingham, MA
01701


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