How To Name Your Website’s Files
*The guest post is by Marita*
Before you simply name a file page1.html, image2.jpg, or some complicated string like a product number, think again. Filenames play a role in SEO, but a good file naming structure also makes it easier for your visitors to save and share links and navigate your website. From a developer’s point of view, having well named files makes it easier to find files and properly structure the hierarchy of the website.
To take advantage of SEO, stay organized, and make it easy for your visitors to enjoy your website, keep the following in mind when creating filenames:
Use keywords in your filenames. Filenames for individual pages become part of the URL and search engines may use the URL to determine relevance in their search results. If you’ve optimized content on a page, then it’s a no-brainer to use the title as the filename, with words separated by hyphens.
The main blogging platforms do this automatically and even Google has recommended to use filenames based on keywords and separated by hyphens. (Hyphens make the URL easier to read by humans and search engines.) You can also try to modify the filename from the title to include variations of a keyword; there may be a difference in how it’s displayed in search results. If you’d like to attract search traffic through image search, be sure to also use your keywords to name your image files, incl. the ALT tag, and the pages they’re displayed on. Image filenames don’t always become part of an URL, depending on your website’s structure, but can still greatly affect usability and SEO of a website.
Use actual words. When web users see links and URLs, they form an idea as to what the page is about and it becomes important to avoid naming files with random methods. For example, if web users are looking for a file about keywords, they are more likely to click on “keywords.html” than they are to click on a file named “200903127789.html”. A good filename is easy to understand and tells visitors what to expect from your webpage.
Avoid the use of special characters. Limit the characters in your filename to lowercase letters a to z, periods, underscores, hyphens and numbers 0 through 9. If you use any other characters, it could cause problems with loading the page. Simply using keywords and avoiding special characters is also beneficial to your SEO efforts. Search engines have been using a combination of URL, title, ALT tags, description and content to find and display results. So taking care to create a useful filenames for your pages and images is an easy way to improve that part of your website’s SEO.
Avoid spaces. For practical purposes using spaces in the filename of your webpage documents is not recommended and usually programs won’t allow it in the first place. Problems arise because the URL will typically be underlined when it is displayed, but it may not be clickable, because the space isn’t recognized as being a part of the URL. In addition, browsers usually require spaces to be encoded as “%20″ or a plus symbol.
Start all of your filenames with lowercase letters. Although the operating system on your computer may not be case sensitive, your web server OS may see things differently. Your computer may interpret “Htmlfile.htm” and “htmlfile.htm” as the same file, whereas a web server would see two separate files. You may also run into trouble using CamelCase (upper and lower case) to name your files.
Shorter is better for filenames. Although you can theoretically use hundreds of characters in your URL, why do it? Keep your filenames to up to about fifty characters: it makes it easier to display them as links, easier to copy and paste (no need for URL shortening), and easier to remember. Having shorter URLs also helps when submitting your URLs to a directory, or aggregator; some will actually have a limit on how many characters your URL may have.
Bottom line: Make it easy for yourself, others working with your website and your visitors and use relevant lowercase keywords separated with hyphens in your pages’ and images’ filenames. Your website won’t only be easy to navigate, share and maintain, but it will also increase traffic to your website.
Marita posts free website tools on RankRaiser.com for anyone interested in designing, marketing and optimizing their own website.
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51 Responses to “How To Name Your Website’s Files”
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These is really good advice for urls http://dailyseotip.com/how-to-name-your-websites-files/648/
RT @renoama2010Improve your Search Engine Rank and name your files right! [http://bit.ly/92FtrQ] Our speaker next week also will be co…
Improve your Search Engine Rank and name your files right! [http://bit.ly/92FtrQ]
Our speaker next week also will be covering SEO tips. #fb
File names do matter! A few tips for maximizing their potential: http://dailyseotip.com/how-to-name-your-websites-files/648/
??? ????????? ?????? ???????? ??????, ????????? ? ?.? – http://bit.ly/92FtrQ – How to name your website’s files… #seo #optimization
Many people often forget to optimize their image file names. By using your keywords for the images, it will most likely get picked up from Google images with that keyword search.
Paramatik Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 9:20 pm
i am getting a lot of visitors from image.google.com.tr because of that optimised image file names.
Josh Stauffer Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Some might be surprised by how much of an impact optimized image file names can have. I have some sites I’ve yet to developed that receive traffic from just having one title and one image on the homepage and that’s it.
Shhh! It is a no brainer but I’m still surprised how many people (even seo firms) don’t use this simple seo tactic.
Agreed – One thing though, Mat Cutts, when asked whether underscores or dashes work better in file names said that dashes are treated like numbers and are less problematic. He also said don’t go running out and changing all your old file names because of this.
I know this isn’t about page names but asked whether a pipe “|” or a dash “-” works better separating elements in page name he said either one is good.
PS Just found your blog via a tweet from @seosmarty RT @dailyseo – Hope to come back and check more of it out in detail. Good stuff. Thanks.
I have always used dashes rather than underscores. It was recommended a long time ago, and it is interesting to see that in this respect technology has not much changed.
Thanks for sharing. Good advice. Seems quite simple but many SEO firms do ignore this
Great article Ann. It’s one of the most effective ways to bring in traffic, especially for products. Google images brings in lots of traffic if you’re selling visual products where there aren’t a lot of descriptive pictures related to that industry.
hi,
Thanks 4 nice Information.
Tc
My CMS automatically puts in an underscore, should i be changing to hyphen?
Helpful article, thanks Marita!
To all my colleagues who, like me, are prone to verbose, keyword-heavy naming conventions: Beware the 2083-character URL limit for Internet Explorer (all IE versions through 8: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427 ). Even though a particular page may pass 2083-character muster, consider what may happen to your analytics software when it has to send this bloated URL along with all manner of extra parameters. I’ll tell you what happens: The server call never gets made, and you lose all analytics tracking for that page.
Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way, when a client’s Omniture data started showing all sorts of holes. Turns out the URLs being passed to SiteCatalyst were just too long for Internet Explorer in some instances, so they had to chop out some eVars to shorten them. But it’s not just Omniture; any analytics package using web beacons (such as Google Analytics) is subject to the same IE bug.
Anyway, by all means, use hyphenated keywords in URLs, but do be mindful of that yucky 2083-character IE limit. [:-)]
lewis tonkinson – My CMS automatically puts in an underscore, should i be changing to hyphen?
yes!
These are important tips to apply in website development, thanks !
Very nice tips. A URL can be effectively used to add keywords but make sure you don’t misuse this opportunity by adding too much keywords that might look as spam to visitors & to search engines as well. Thanks for sharing.
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Thanks for the post, enjoyed it.
Thanks for all the great comments! Seems like a lot of you like using keywords in your image tags; this strategy has been working very well for us as well! In fact, it’s turned out to be one of the easiest ways to attract traffic.
A URL can be finer acclimated to add keywords but accomplish abiding you don’t abusage this befalling by abacus too abundant keywords that ability attending as spam to visitors & to seek engines as well.Hangzhou Yisite Tielin Electronic Technology Co.,Ltd. is a manufacturer specializing in eas accessories (eas tagand security tags ) , Our products are widely applied to eas in supermarkets and department stores.
Good reading. Thanks for hard work and writing your heart out.
Would be more easy to understand with descriptive pictures.
I also second more pictures. Looking at the massive wall of text, I had to take 3 breaks. But don’t get me wrong because it was well worth it! thanks mate!
Thank you! Is there a tool that will do this for us? Or all manual?
Great, solid advice. All to often we see sites with long file names – trying to keyword stuff. There is no need to no this anymore – it’s not the 2000 and can potentially come across spammy to SE’s. I think it is always a good idea to build for the user first (taking account of basic SEO principles – like file structure).
People should use their targeted keywords for image name as well in Alt text it helps in image optimization
Great technique will try to implement this. Thanks
I didn’t notice this part of makeing website, you inspire me.
Thanks,
This is a great article and a great website. I liked it very much. It will help me to optimise my websites in europe. I have website in travel and that means a lot of seo work !!
Thanks a lot and greetings,
Dave and Carol
Seo and Travel Website in Europe, France
In response to Luke’s and Lewis’ question, Google – still the search engine that provides the most search results – has pointed out in one of their videos last year that at one point there was a slight bias towards using hyphens instead of underlines, but that that wouldn’t make a difference going forward. They stated that if you have a choice, to use hyphens, but if you have a whole site using underlines not to bother changing them. Like I’ve mentioned, I learned about this from on of their videos (I think it was Matt speaking) last year, so I assume it really isn’t an issue any more.
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