Your Views: Does your url affect your search engine optimization?

[Alexandro]

I want to know your views on whether the url of your website will affect your search engine ranking

well, my view is that url DOES affect your rankings.

whats yours?

 

[OutThere]

as far as I know, if you have your meta down pat, your url doesn't matter.

 

[Larry K]

urls do effect ranking, but are not "required".
its only one factor of 100s

but it is nice to know you can control 1 of the many factors.
so, if you can... you should.

 

[TheMajor]

It definetally affects ranking. If your URL contains a keyword that most of your client search for, you are one step ahead of the competition.

 

[john872]

I have been doing SEO for 4 years and can say that URLs and domain names do affect search engine rankings quite a bit.

For example,

If you have a site called online-affiliate-programs.com that was about affiliate programs and then you had a site called affprogs.com, then the first one will get much more benefit than the second.

Don't forget that quite a few sites that link to you use your domain name in the url's anchor text plus some will even use the following in the anchor text: "online affiliate programs" or for the second domain "aff progs". Now you can see which one will benefit the most. It would be the first one as it includes affiliate programs in the anchor text and the page is about affiliate programs.

 

[skywriteing]

Url is 20% of Ranking, On-page SEO is 40%, and Off Page SEO is 40%.

Those numbers fluxuate, but hover in that area.
per James Brausch (who has software in orbit around the earth)