seo url writing tips Archives - Page 2 of 2

Ask the Experts: Links, Tags, and File Names –…

May 11, 2008
by Jennifer Grappone

Q: I am currently reading your book “Search Engine Optimization – An Hour A Day”. It has some excellent instruction. Having created a few sites that thankfully have ranked well in the search engines, I’m looking for answers to a few specific questions. Could you possibly answer some of them? Feel free to be brief.

Q: Do you place value in naming a file after the main keyword on the page?

A: Yes, there is some value in this. But don’t make it too long – you don’t want a 20 word list. And separate your keywords with dashes or underscores.

Q: Do you place value in using <H1> header tags for the page title in the body section?

A: We lean toward “Yes.” <H1> tags probably improve the weight of the words inside the tag. This is a fairly minor factor, and because it’s so easy to manipulate, we expect that its importance will diminish over time (if not already).

Q: Is there value in placing the body text higher up on the body page and having navigation links follow after? That is, so that the SE’s see the keyword-rich text section first?

A: This probably doesn’t affect ranks for the keyword, but it may affect how your listing displays. Body text will likely create an easier to read “snippet” than navigation, so it should go higher on the page than navigation text if possible.

Q: Shouldn’t navigation links always be text-based where possible?

A: Yes.

Q: What is the maximum number of links that a site map should point to?

A: We think 100 links is a good rule of thumb for a max.

Q: Would it be a good idea to link to all 100 of my pages from the home page?

A: As far as search engines are concerned, having such a large number of links from your home page would “dilute” the significance of each link. It’s not really a penalty, but we generally recommend focusing on a smaller number of top landing pages. More importantly, 100 links from your home page is not likely to be a good design for your human audience.

Q: Should all website keywords be included in the META keywords tag?

A: While Meta keywords are a minor factor, we see no harm in including your top keywords in them. And this tag is a good place to include alternate spellings or misspellings of your keywords that you wouldn’t feel comfortable adding to your site’s visible text.

ask the experts

Ask the Experts: Should I Have Dashes In My…

April 9, 2008
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I noticed you don’t have dashes in your domain name (your-seo-plan.com). Why? Is there anything wrong with them?

A: There is no major problem with dashes in domain names. The main reason that we chose not to use one, and that we generally advise against dashes, is that hyphenated names don’t pass the “radio test.” The radio test is this: if you had to say your domain name on the radio, would people know how to spell it, or would you need to spell it out? So, names like “wherehouse.com” or “civil-litigation-firm.com” have a problem because every time you give out the URL in person or over the phone you will have to spell it out. That means it’s harder for people to remember and communicate to others!

It’s well-known in the SEO industry that search engines are aware of hyphens and perceive them as spaces (see Google’s Matt Cutts on the subject of dashes and underscores ). However, we generally advise against using too many words, as a Google engineer wrote: “you can have too much of a good thing. It also doesn’t take a special tool to know that this page name isn’t user-friendly:
african-elephants-and-their-habitats-and-diet-and-history-and-extinction-possibilities-and-this-page-is-really-great.htm”

While we generally avoid dashes in domain names, this advice does not apply to filenames. We do recommend that dashes be used in filenames to separate out keywords. For example, the file name: “seo-advice.html” is preferable to “seoadvice.html”. Similarly, it is a good idea to use a seperator in folder names. This not only helps search engines, it also helps your human audience understand what the page is about, as you can see when you compare these two examples:

without dashes: //www.yourseoplan.com/seotips/googlelovesme.html
with dashes: //www.yourseoplan.com/seo-tips/google-loves-me.html

If dashes don’t float your boat, you can choose another separator. We believe that underscores and tildes (_, ~ ) are also recognized by Google as word separators.