Interview with Search Engine Optimization Expert, Matt McGee

For those of you that don't know the name Matt McGee yet, he became a regular on the SEO speaking circuit in 2006, with speaking gigs at the Search Engine Strategies conferences in San Jose and Chicago. He's a columnist for Search Engine Land, a contributing writer at Search Engine Guide, and a moderator on the Small Business Brief forum. He posts regularly on various industry blogs and forums (often under the nickname “pleeker”). He's actually so famous that he's been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Search Engine Watch, and a variety of other outlets.  So, when it came to explaining what makes an SEF url/permalink, I thought why not ask an expert to give his deep thoughts on the matter.  Another reason I felt Matt would be a perfect subject for this piece is that his wife is a Real Estate Agent, so he is extremely connected to SEO in the real estate space.  So, without further ado... Matt McGee on SEF urls for your real estate blog.

Q: What is a search engine friendly URL/Permalink for a real estate blog?

At minimum, it's a URL that search engine spiders can crawl. But usually when we talk about a search-friendly URL, we mean more than that. We mean a URL that also helps the spider understand what the page is about. In blogging terms, this is a search-friendly URL:

http://www.domain.com/?p=150

A spider that reaches that URL should have no trouble crawling the page (assuming there are no other crawlability problems). So, technically, it's a search-friendly URL. But when thinking about SEO and making your page the best it can be, it's good to include keywords in the URL to help the spider understand what the page is about. In blogging, this typically means using your post title/headline in the URL, like this:

http://www.domain.com/2007/08/how-to-choose-a-real-estate-agent/

That's a pretty common URL structure with WordPress blogs, but WordPress URLs can be customized in just about any way you can imagine. It's a better URL than the first example because it specifically tells the spider what the page is about. It associates keywords like "real estate", "real estate agent", "how to choose", "choose real estate agent", etc., with the page. When you include keywords in the URL, you're helping the spider figure things out a little better.

Q: What do you think of URL's that contain strings or just numbers?

Well, those aren't optimized as well as they can be. If you can control the URL, and most bloggers can, I'd certainly recommend not using the p=150 type of URL. But it also has to be said that there are plenty of great blogs and Web sites that rank well with URLs like the p=150 example. Search Engine Land (searchengineland.com) uses a date and time stamp in its URLs, but there's no harm because the site has great content and earns all kinds of links.

The URL structure is just one factor of many, but if you can do it right, why wouldn't you?

Q: How does hyphenating a URL help or effect search engines?

The hyphen serves as a space. It helps separate keywords. Underscores historically don't serve as spaces. But just a few days ago, Google's Matt Cutts said they're "looking at" being able to treat underscores the same as dashes. He also said if you can use dashes, you should.

Q: Is there such a thing as keyword overload in a URL?

It's not written in stone, but at some point your URL starts to look spammy when you stuff it like a turkey. A domain like www.mortgage-loans-best-dallas-lender.com just doesn't look trustworthy. A blog post with a URL like www.domain.com/buy-real-estate-buy-homes-dallas-texas/ has the same effect. When working with clients, we generally recommend no more than two dashes in a Web page URL. The exception to that, of course, would be what we talked about above -- on blogs where the post title is automatically converted to the URL:

http://www.domain.com/2007/08/how-to-choose-a-real-estate-agent/

Even though it has six hyphens, that URL doesn't look spammy; it looks like a potentially helpful article I should read.

Q: How many URL's in a domain it to many as far as re-directing and linking?

Can you clarify the question?

What exactly does an unfriendly URL contain?

Spiders don't like URLs with session IDs in them. That's more of a problem with e-commerce sites and database-driven sites than it is with blogs. Spiders also don't like URLs with too many parameters in them, like this:

http://www.domain.com/article?PID=3457654&CID=235&AID=778&refer=RSS

In that URL, each equal sign represents a separate parameter, or variable. There are four in that example. The general recommendation is two or fewer, although if you do some digging through the SERPs, you'll see some really long, ugly URLs in there. But I wouldn't take that to mean you have free license to use ugly URLs, too.

When choosing a domain name some people like to use the name of their company or their own name and others like to use their farm areas or the type of real estate they gear towards, which of these do you recommend and why?

I don't think there's a blanket answer to this question; it really depends on the situation. My wife is a real estate agent, and she uses her name as the domain (www.carimcgee.com) rather than using a domain that references the local city name, like tricitiesrealestate.com or something. The logic for that is pretty simple: It's easier to remember ("my name dot com"), it's shorter, and she can keep using it if we move to some other city or state. If you use a city-based domain and then move somewhere else, you have to start over with a new domain, which has no trust, no age benefits, and so forth.

From a pure SEO perspective, there would be a small benefit to having a keyword-based domain. But in a service industry like real estate, where word-of-mouth and referrals are so critical, we decided that name branding was more important. And if you build a site with great content that gets lots of links, not having keywords in the domain isn't a problem. Like anything else, that's just one factor and it can be overcome by doing the other things really well.

Q: What is the best place to put a blog if you have an existing site?

I imagine you (like me) get asked a lot about where's the best place to put a blog -- on the client's main domain? on a sub-domain? or on a new domain altogether? We always recommend putting it on the main domain as the best option, because then your main site shares all the benefits that the blog gives you -- link equity from inbound links, fresh content, and so forth. If that's not an option, we recommend using a sub-domain (blog.domain.com) because it helps with the branding and recognition of the domain name. Putting the blog on an entirely new domain would be the last option. So, in order, the recommendation would be:

Best: http://www.domain.com/blog/
Next-best: http://blog.domain.com/
If you must: http://www.newdomain.com/

Matt, thanks for your insight into this issue of making your urls friendly to search engines and how best to do that.  Hope that you will back again to clarify the issue of keyword stuffing vs. keyword rich content, a topic which has become very heated int he idustry lately.

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