Search Engine Optimization: Naming Your HTML Files

I told you earlier this week that I had attended a business conference where several of the sessions focused on web marketing. I learned a few new tidbits, and there's one I want to share with you today, because I know that in general, online entrepreneurs haven't picked up on this.

I'm not an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination. Most of what I have learned about SEO (search engine optimization) in building several websites, I've had to learn the "hard knocks" way. That includes loosing a bunch of money to an SEO firm that didn't do anything for me except take my money. But that's another story.

The little tip I have for you today has to do with naming your website's html files (page files). We know (or we should know) that page titles, meta tags, descriptions and website page content should all contain keywords relevant to the page. However, I was not aware until recently that including keywords in naming your html files can also help with page rank in the search engine results. It just never occurred to me.

So, if you are building a website, updating or revising your website, consider naming your new html files using your keywords. For example, instead of your main page or landing page being named http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html or http://www.yourdomain.com/home, name the page http://www.yourdomain.com/southern_cooking_recipes.html or http://www.yourdomain.com/womens_health_answers.html.

Get the idea? Using this technique helps the search engines further determine what your webpage is about and assign relevancy to the keywords and information it contains, which can help in terms of how your webpage ranks in the search results.

Enough for today. A great source of free SEO information can be found at http://www.seobook.com.

Toodles.