Web Design and SEO Blog

SEO Tip: Search Engine Friendly Page Names

Have you ever been on a web page and noticed question marks or ampersands in the page name?  Maybe something like "mysite.com/index.html?p=4" or worse "mysite.com/index.html?p=4&w;=0001&h=1010". These are examples of pages name that are NOT search engine friendly.

Page names are an important part of SEO and should contain keywords related to the page.

If your web site has static pages then it's fairly easy to name them as you want.  The name should make sense to people, contain keywords, and use hyphens, slashes or plus signs to separate the keywords. The hyphen, slash and plus sign are processed as spaces by search engines.  The underscore is not always seen as a space so it's best to avoid it for separating keywords. If you have a web site with fresh apples for sale you might use a page name like "mysite.com/fresh-apples.html" or "mysite.com/fresh-apples-for-sale.html".

If your web site has dynamic pages then your content management system (CMS) might have built in functionality for search engine friendly URLs or there may be third party plug-ins available.  WordPress has a feature called permalinks that can be used for creating search engine friendly names.  Joomla has a SEO feature appropriately titled Search Engine Friendly URLs.

Making sure your web site's page names contain keywords and are formatted to distinguish the keywords is another important step in securing higher search engine rankings.

James
Spidle Webs Web Design - Website design, development, search engine optimization and pay-per-click campaigns.