Are Lens URLs THAT important?
The URL of your lens is your identifier, how people and search engines alike know where your lens is located. On a scale of 10, the importance of your lens URL is probably in the 3-6 range.
Use one to three words separated by a hyphen. (hyphens are easier to remember and faster to type than underscores) You will have more success if these are real words than gobbledygook, and even more if the words bear a remote resemblance to the topic of your lens.
People don’t really type URLs into address bars anymore (excepting root domains) so, while being memorable as a lens url is useful (like /tricks /squidconomy /basichtml and the like) it’s better to be bookmarkable.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that bookmarkable and remarkable are very similar? Probably not says the pirate in me.
January 26th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Thanks for the reminder. Your tips are always so helpful.
January 26th, 2009 at 9:40 am
And you, of course, are pirateamarkable. Great tip as usual. Thanks.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Although I become more and more convinced that most SEO tactics are more superstition than knowledge, I now try to use a keyword that I want to compete for in the lens URL. I never use underscores, and used to be more afraid of hyphens, but now feel comfortable with even multiple hyphens.
Best,
FunWithTrains
January 30th, 2009 at 10:39 am
We’ve discovered the url to be huge in terms of seo. If you do a search for ‘washington real estate news’ the site that is usually #1 or #2 is our site with the same url as the search phrase. The phrase is beating out sites with much more authority than ours, so Google is placing a large part of their algorhythm on keywords in the url.
February 3rd, 2009 at 7:38 am
Colleen,
I agree that it can have SOME impact, especially in non-competitive query spaces (or low competition spaces). That’s one of the reasons that Squidoo is powerful.
However, I bet that you use the terms ‘washington, real estate, and news’ throughout your lens as well (Especially in the Title and other headers).
I DO think that the URL can help ‘classify’ a lens as well as get it ranked. Is /wii going to be more useful than /4576
on a lens about the wii? Sure.
Use all the tools at your disposal, Just don’t get blinded into thinking there is only ‘one way’.
Thanks for the comment!
February 7th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
The URL is important from a SEO point of view but it is also important that it be somewhat memorable. With today’s browsers, if you enter the first couple of letters, the browser brings up the rest. I would rather go to my favorite site that way than to open up the bookmarks for it.
October 9th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Thanks for the newbies steps. That is helpful. I have a question, as a newbies, how do you build credibility in the niche? I assume we need to build credibility to build the list?