We all know (don’t we?) that including keywords in URLs helps with SEO. Blog posts, view item pages on your website, and so on get a little boost when the URL is made of actual language rather than /p=3223&cat=97&id=zdfdf8989d type nonsense.
Most ecommerce and blogging systems now do this automatically. Which is where you need to be careful, or you’ll end up with URLs like the one the BBC gave out for Heston Blumenthal’s recipe for carrots glazed with cumin:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/carrotsglazedwithcum_80467
The BBC are no fun and have changed it now, to carrots_glazed_with. I’d suggest this is a mistake: carrots_glazed_cumin would have been better, because cumin is a much more important keyword than with. In any case, when you’re choosing a blogging or ecommerce platform, be sure you can edit URLs to something you’re happy with.
But this shows us that there’s more to traffic generation than SEO. Heston’s recipe has got much, much more traffic out of the unfortunate truncation of his title than he will from Google searches for the recipe itself. When you’re thinking about traffic generation, don’t forget to think about the human aspects too.
