SEO Friendly File Names
When thinking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), people often overlook the importance of file names. Read on to learn about how you can implement SEO friendly file names on your web site…
When a web page’s file name is oriented to SEO, it will have a better chance of gaining high rankings in search results – especially if other efforts are made to optimize it. To be SEO friendly, a file name should do each of the following:
1. Contain keywords that people search for (the words must also be relevant to the page’s content)
2. Separate the keywords, preferably with hyphens (-); see the example below.
3. Avoid repeating words in the rest of the URL, like domain or directory names.
This is not really all that difficult to implement. Here are some examples of SEO friendly web page file names:
pascal-programming-books.htm
used-motorcycles-los-angeles.htm
get-better-tv-reception.shtml
charlotte-nc-weather-report.asp
easy-microwave-recipes.php
Hyphens separate the words so that search engines can individually recognize them, rather than seeing them as one long, unintelligible word. Some sites use other punctuation, but hyphens are the most SEO friendly.
If your web site already has dozens or hundreds of pages, it is probably best to start using these file names on new pages, but to leave the existing pages as they are.
On the other hand, if your site only has a few pages, it might be worthwhile to change their file names. However, the old pages ought to be removed and your site should be set to redirect users from the old URLs to the new. Search engines don’t look favorably on duplicate pages, and you also don’t want users who have “bookmarked” the pages not to be able to return.
Putting in a little extra time to make your file names SEO friendly should eventually help increase your search engine based traffic without much difficulty.
No related posts.
Web Design & Structure | seowhitehats | January 11, 2009
In my opinion it is always worthwhile to rename file names as long as we 301 redirect them. Through 301 most of the Pagerank, Backlinks and importance of the old page will be passed on to the new page as long as these pages, old and new, are relevant. Google takes car of it