I was thinking about this the other day, and URLs really are important. Remember that most people do not know about SEO, do not know that many people build little sites to make money through Adsense et al, they see every site as being a respectable business, until told otherwise. When you work building and promoting sites for a while, it is easy to forget that a vast majority of your users have not idea what it is all about – they just see the Internet as a convenient way to shop.

So, a URL is important. Maybe not for SE traffic, but certainly to get people on your site. A simple SEO related example – when I first started building my own website, a friend said to me “learn about search engine optimisation”. So I Googled “search forum” (or similar) and found searchguild.com (now deceased). It was a great little forum and I learnt a lot. But if it was called “snazpants.com” I probably would never have clicked the result in the search listings. So, back to the question, “for search engine rankings”. To rank, you need people to like you, and people can only like you if they visit you. A good URL is very important. But, you can still do well without a great one.