Should you use your keywords in the URLs of your web pages? Do search engines look at the keywords that are included in the addresses of your web pages and do these keywords have an effect on the rankings of your website?

Google's statement about keywords in URLs

Google's Matt Cutts recently posted a video about the position of keywords in the URL of a web page. He said that keywords in the URL do help a little bit.

He also said that one should not obsess with the order of the words and that you should not use too many keywords in the same URL.

Yahoo's statement about keywords in URLs

Yahoo filed a patent application with the name "Techniques for Tokenizing URLs" that has been published on March 26th 2009. The patent application contains information on how search engines might extract keywords from the URLs of pages.

Search engines look at many different web page elements to determine what a page is about. Most keywords are extracted from the content of the web pages but search engines can also consider the URL of a web page to find related keywords.

Yahoo's patent shows in detail how keywords can be extracted from URLs. That's a strong indicator that Yahoo also considers the keywords in URLs.