Text URLs are great for optimisation, but if say you are looking at the keyword ‘ebay design’ as you are an ebay design company, would the URL http://www.kidsontalks.com/ebaydesign, http://www.kidsontalks.com/ebay-design or http://www.kidsontalks.com/ebay_design work better?

Matt Cutts of Google Fame says that:

So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

Shall we run an experiment? If I set up pages all about ebay design on this domain in those three formats shall we see which one ranks better? Now, random jibber is going to be my content filler and the pages will appear at the top of this site. I have chosen the term ‘ebay design’ as my target as it is a highly competative keyword and I am unlikely to get to the top page for this term. Which is what I would prefer as I don’t DO ebay design and I would not want to disrupt the companies that do in the search listings. This is only an experiment to see which SEF URL format would rank higher for the keyword search in Google, Yahoo and MSN. I shall use this tool to check results.

Let the experiment begin…..