This has been something that has been of discussion for a very long time in seo. I think the general concensus is that keywords within the url might well help ranking in search engines, but not significantly.

However, Matt Cutts has implied their importance to be more significant than many may have thought. His post talks about auto generated urls which often contain random characters rather than pretty asthetic links which contain keywords relevant to the topic.

Matt Cutts explains -

“In general, urls like that sometimes look like session IDs to search engines. Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page“.

Barry Schwartz is quite miffed by this over at SEW. But if we looks closely to what Matt Cutts has said previously, I think he has implied that the importance of url keywords before.

He wrote a blog post regarding changing the default printer on Linux and Firefox and later explained the significance of this post.

You will notice the headline of the page is -

“Changing the default printer on Linux and Firefox”

While the full url parameters have a slight variation on those keywords with -

“/change-default-printer-linux-firefox/”.

Not many picked up on the these small details, but Matt did explain all in another post.

“Notice what I did with keywords. I carefully chose keywords for the title and the url (note that I used “change” in the url and “changing” in the title). The categories on my post (”How to” and “Linux”) give me a subtle way to mention Linux again, and include a couple extra ways that someone might do a search–lots of user type “how to (do what they want to do).”

This kinda highlighted further the significance of url keywords.

Obviously I have really embraced this information and hence why I still haven’t got round to changing my permalink structure on this blog yet…

Update (03/09/06) - Now I do…