Small Business Resource Center Blog: SEO Optimized Website File Names

Here's some advice for do-it-yourself small business website design. Some search engine experts claim insider knowledge about how search engines work, and offer to reveal their secrets for a fee. Citing just one example, you may be surprised to learn that SEO optimized website file names are not really secret. Don't expect them to give away search algorithms, but the major search engines do reveal design strategy that may help your small business website. Here's more about website file names.

Website designers 10 years ago did not give much thought to file names, and most web page names were single words followed by the htm extension. More recently search engine optimization, seo, has evolved into a science with web developers forming opinions about right and wrong. Today techniques for file naming website pages and graphics allows multiple words, and these words are commonly run together or separated by a space, hyphen, or underscore. Which is best?

Truth: Literal file names for pages or graphics offer nominal value for search engine optimization.

Google can separate words run together and spaces are okay, yet they prefer hyhens to underscores. Until recently underscores linked words into nonsensical words while spaces or hyphens were harmless because they are ignored. Some experts insist you must use hyphens, but even that is changing.

File names are not a major factor for SEO. Content is still what determines the value and relevance of your pages, so do not agonize over your file naming method. Words connected by underscores can now be separated by Google and they do a good job separating words run together. While the other major search engines should eventually catch up to indexing by ignoring the underscore, my advice is naming with hyphens for new page or graphic names if you want to optimize for SEO.

It is not necessary to rename existing files. Your content is the key for attracting visitors and search engine results.

My preference has been underscores because they are easier to read. This has not affected my ability to attract quality traffic based on more important search engine optimization techniques like quality content added often. For website visitors who hover over links to view the file name in the lower status bar before following the hyperlink, underscore separated words are easier for them to read, also, so you decide.

Promoting your small business website can be accomplished without paying a consultant. To learn more about proven zero cost SEO methods, view the free SEO PDF reports here, or read about SEO Advice to Feed Search Engines here. The only investment will be your time.