• Rankings- the urls provide a way of placing your preferred major keyword in the file path. This makes the keyword more prominent hence more relevant to your SEO efforts.
• Usability- an obvious URL usually helps the visitor to know what the page is all about even before opening the page. This will help in deciding whether the page is relevant or not.
• Click-through rate- a clear URL will obviously influence a visitor to click it. This is because he or she finds it relevant to the searched term.

How to include keywords in your URL’s
It is clear that placing keywords in your urls’ will make a difference to your SEO efforts. However, this does not mean that you have to stuff your URL’s with keywords only. This will actually prove detrimental. A better practice would be to ensure that the keywords in the file path occur in a natural manner. They should also make the URL easier to comprehend or even remember. Finally it’s also good to balance the URL’ length as a very short URL can be boring hence fatal for your SEO efforts.

Best SEO practices regarding URL’s
Apart from the keywords, there are other ways to make URL’s work for your SEO needs. The first thing is separating words on the file path. Using a dash is currently considered the best method. However, this might not be very necessary for Google, as the search engine has developed smart ways of identifying separate words. Other ways of separating the words include using a space. However, this has the disadvantage of less encoding of the URL and also makes it hard to share the URL in social bookmarking services. Using the & symbol is also another way of separating words. This method encodes the URL at %26 which makes the URL hard to read and also hard to share in some bookmarking services. Commas and periods have also been used to separate words but they have been constantly abused by spammers. Finally, there is the underscore. Although this was not normally considered a word, separator by many search engines this is slowly changing. It is therefore not a bad word separator.

Another important thing to note when it comes to SEO URL best practices, is the case. It is better to use lower case URL’s rather than duplicating in both cases. Once you have the URL’s in lower case, you can use the 301 status code to redirect to all the other URL versions. Finally, the URL extensions should also feature with regard to SEO optimization. This is because the extensions help the users to know whether it is actually a page or a subdirectory. Extensions can also include the date, which will help when searching for past information. However, you should understand that most people only search for current information.

Everyone who owns a website yearns for first page results from the major search engines. This usually ensures more human traffic to the site. The process used in achieving this objective is known as SEO. Although SEO experts will charge you a service fee for optimizing your site, there are many free Seo tools, which you can use to attain some form of optimization. The tools are designed to achieve specific objectives since Seo is a very wide subjects and therefore hard to have one tool that meets all the requirements. Some of the areas you can get free tools on include:

• Keyword research
• Analytics
• Checking backlinks
• Checking page ranks

Apart from SEO the visibility of a website is also increased through search engine marketing. This usually involves placement of contextual advertising and paid inclusions. However, this can be very expensive hence it is important to try the free tools first before opting for SEM

Some popular free SEO tools

SEO toolbar

This is a very important tool that will help you as a webmaster to save time hence expediting your daily procedures. As you will realize, time is a very important resource especially when it comes to searching parameters of websites to perceive the specific nature of the promotion and various salient features. The SEO toolbars are usually incorporated to the browsers. In use, the toolbar provides an auto filler, which is used to remember the details, used earlier when the website is being introduced to different directories. This allows the boxes to be filled on their own.

Page ranking tool

Page rank is very important when it comes to the amount of traffic that a website receives. A higher rank is directly related to more traffic to the website. Page rank usually gives an indication of the links to a page and also the quality of those links. The free page rank tool will help you analyze the links to the site. The tool also helps you to know which sites are linking to the content in your site and the success of the link creation activity. Some of the ranking tools also have an extended feature that lets the webmaster to know the true position of the website. This is very important if you want to establish why your site is lagging behind and any steps that you may need to take to improve this.

Anchor generator

The anchor generator is a very important tool, which informs the search engines what a page is all about by using anchor text.  Apart from this, it is also includes a keyword research tool which helps identify the right keywords and key phrases which should be targeted. Apart from this you will also be able to know the competition that the given keywords have. Finally you will also be ale to get certain useful keywords that you never thought about before by using this tool.

Google AdWords keyword tool

The foundation of SEO is centered on keywords. This means that you have to include certain keywords in your site to make progress. However, no every word qualifies as a keyword. This means that you need a specific way to establish which keywords are searched on Google. The adwords tool will help you when it comes to this.

Well Researched Keywords and Key Phrases:
A well written article should be rich in well researched keywords and key phrases which are related to your article or to your niche. There are many types of people who can come to your website. There are some who are just web surfer and they merely surf the web and there are some who really want to seek unique content related to their projects or assignments. People just type the desired keyword which they want to search in search engine and it can be anything therefore an article must have all the keywords related to search conducted by a user for example if you have a website related to “weight loss” than you must have articles and keywords related to weight loss.

Rich Keyword Density:

A good keyword density of an article is important for search engine to feel its presence. An article which is ranked high by search engine should have three to five percent of keyword density. Keyword density is the term used for the number of time a keyword or a phrase is repeated in an article. If an article does not have reasonable keyword density, than it can be ignored by the search engine.

Unique Article Content:

Do not try to riddle your content with too many keywords and phrases. A unique article should be interesting and it should give something unique and informative to their readers. An informative article with good grammar and punctuation helps you to attract people on to your website and soon more and more people will log on to your website to seek the unique content which not only provide them plenty of information but it also help you to promote your products and helps the customers to build their trust on your product.

Linking Content:

When you will be able to create a unique content for your website which is keyword rich than you just have to submit it in article directories like E-zine or to other important directories. Always make sure to complete full resource box which should have a complete detail of your contact information so that if people like the product which you have described in your article than they will contact with you and help you to promote your business.