Long URL's

[snap]

I have read in the past discussions about using long url's. Does anyone have input on this? My client is wanting to use a 4 word url and i'm not sure its a good idea.

[Quadrille]

In general, it's neither good nor bad; it depends on what the name is, and if it's the best for the site.

In SEO terms, it makes almost no difference at all, but it can make a little difference.

For example, theverybestwidgets.com is no better - and probably worse - than bestwidgets. And worse than widgets.com.

But best-widgets.com is probably better than the-very-best-widgets.com, and all are better than the_very_best_widgets.com

Why?

Key words in the URL really don't matter a lot; they only really help when the URL appears on the page; but that's uncommon. The page TITLE is much more likely to appear, with the URL invisible as a hyperlink.

Even when it does appear, multiwordurls and multi_word_URLs are utterly useless, unless someone types in that specific search term - pretty unlikely, and the more words, the less likely.

When people search, they just rarely search for 'abunchofkeywords', they are much more likely to search for 'a bunch of key words'

So if you must do it, they need to be hyphenated, or linked by.a.dot to get any benefit from searchers.

The only other point to consider is "type ins" - people may type ihelpyou.com, because it's fairly short and sweet, and easily remembered correctly (except for ihelpu.com typists!)

The longer the term, and the less memorable, the fewer type-ins it's going to get.

I hope that all makes sense, I'm getting a headache :)

BTW - I've been assuming you mean a long domain name