There are many things you can do to help your website rank higher on Google when people search for certain terms. However, there are many myths that simply do not help, or even worse can result in your website being penalized. There are other techniques that will do nothing for you and just waste your time. So the key is to determine what things you can do. VRG Web Design recently wrote a blog post on the first SEO activities you should do, which includes deciding on your key words. There recently was a great article on Search Engine Watch discussing whether you should include key words in your URL is a ranking factor that will increase your likelihood of coming up higher on the results page, such as adding keywords.
There are two ways to look at this topic. The first is whether to include keywords in your actual domain name. The second is whether to include key words in your URL structure. It is our opinion that including terms in your domain name does not help for highly competitive terms, and only serves to make your domain name longer and looks spammy. However, if you can do so, and it makes your name easy to read or remember, then there is a benefit. For example, if your keyword is “Nepali coffee”, and you are lucky enough to own the domain name nepalicoffee.com, then you will have a benefit because it is easy for users to remember the name and when it comes up in search engines, it is easily identifiable. However, to simply add the text to a site such as johnsnepalicoffeeshop.com is a bit much. You also have to remember that it will make your email address very long every time you give it out.
On the other hand, if you are creating sub-pages, and one page is all about nepali coffee, then to set up your URL structure to read johnscoffee.com/nepali-coffee/ will work very well. In this example, Johnscoffee.com is the domain name and it can now have a page for each type of coffee it sells and try to rank of each of them. Moreover, it is easy for users and search engines to understand the content of the page and there are no surprises, so that users click off of the page quickly.
For more information or to discuss your search engine marketing strategy, you should contact a local search vendor near you. We would be happy at VRG Web Design to discuss this with you too.