Effect of URl on Organic Ranking?

Question

i have been looking on some of website which has very bad url and they are spending a lot of menoy on PPC. Do you think is it good to spend a lot of money on PPC and nOne on SEO e.g.

what is your take on this url

http://www.luxuryholidaysdirect.com/SpecialOffer_Hotels.aspx?Destination=Mauritius&Offers=SpecialOffer&ContinentXid=1&DestinationXid=1&CategoryId=5&OfferTab=HotDeal

Answer 1

Hi Tahir,

Website URI is really a small factor in overall SEO.  While there are usually issues where search engines won't index URIs with more than 2 or 3 arguments, this is really a minor issue for the site you mention.

That is a specific URI for a PPC landing page and should be treated as such.  Otherwise, it looks like that site has quite a few pages indexed (see link below).

As far as whether it's a good idea to spend a lot of money on PPC and none on SEO, how do you know that they're not spending money on SEO?  ;)

Realistically though, it's always a good idea to spend money on PPC IF you're making money on it.  Why wouldn't you?  The big difference with PPC is that it is immediate and you start seeing traffic as soon as you launch your campaign.

With a bit of tweaking and testing, you can be making money in a relatively short period of time albeit with an initial investment of time and money.

With SEO, you can invest time and money in it and it may be worth your while -- assuming that you are able to rank well for keywords that *bring in the conversions*.

After all, what is the point of spending a lot of time and money optimizing your site and building backlinks if the keywords you rank well for don't result in conversions?

PPC is the best and quickest way to figure out which keywords will convert for your market.  You can then organically optimize for those keywords later.

Cheers,

John

Answer 2

PPC advertising is not only expensive, it's a recurring cost.  Moreover, the results you get from it are only temporary.  Cut off PPC advertising and you'll be in the same mess as before, poor search engine rankings, poor credibility and poor traffic.  

SEO, on the other hand, although also expensive, builds more or less permanent benefits for your website.  Why?

1.  Better site structure:  makes it easier for spiders to index your pages EVEN after the SEO project.

2.  Better content:  keyword optimized content and relevant content not only improves your rankings, it also increases your credibility to your potential customers thereby increasing return traffic, conversion rates AND referrals.

3.   Backlinks:  creates more or less permanent roadways in the internet for people to find your site.  As opposed to the toll you have to pay for temporary PPC roads.

there are a lot more advantages but they are too many to cover here.

As for your original question, yup, URLs definitely has a great effect on organic ranking.  This is because the URL itself (if its a generic name) goes a long way into improving the relevance of your site.  After all, how can a domain name such as dogs.com be about anything else but dogs?

Search engines however do not like dynamic URLs (those that have unusual characters especially & and ?.  These are usually  automatically generated by online stores that have databases like EBay.

Generic domains also has type in traffic.  This is traffic from people who do not use search engines but type the search phrase directly into their browsers.   Depending on how generic your domain name/URL is, your type in traffic might even attract more people through type in than Search engines.  that's why people pay a lot for generic domains.  s*x.com sold for $9.5 Million a few years back.

to summarize, good URLs or domain names have the best value for your money in terms of traffic, second is SEO and third PPC.

OCS

www.onlinecreativesolutions.com

Answer 3

Well for me its not a good idea to spend your time and money only on PPC, its better to have the advantage of both while promoting on PPC at the same time in SEO also. The advantage on PPC is a high in traffic that will converted into high sales, while in SEO once you get rank on google you will get also a consistent high traffic and of course a high sales as well without the huge expenses and it will last as long as you continue optimizing your website.