No Comments Written by Robert on August 11, 2008 – 8:00 am

Creating search-engine-optimized Web pages is the core effort of a successful Internet marketing campaign. Taking care of technical on-site factors such as file names, title tags, meta description tags, meta keyword tags, and meta robots tags is crucial to making sure the search-engine spiders can determine the relevance of your Web site. Think of search-engine spiders as robots that read the content of your Web pages. Optimizing your content with header tags and other text modifiers allows you to stress the main ideas and topics that your content covers.

Optimization of images is important for those Web browsers that do not support images, and because search-engine spiders cannot read the content of an image, optimizing images presents an extra avenue to squeeze in more content. Links provide the pathways that search-engine spiders need to find your Web pages. Creating these links with search-engine optimization in mind is necessary for optimal results. Throughout the Web page creation process, try to adhere to the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium. The consortium works to create standards in Web design and development that ensure Internet-wide compatibility.

Choose File Names

Every Web page that you create is stored in a file. Every file has a name. Using file names that are relevant to the content of your Web page is important for numerous reasons. Besides your domain name, the search-engine spiders see your file names before anything else. If your file names are not relevant to the content contained on that page, the search engines can algorithmically detect a disconnect. Taking the extra time to ensure that file names are properly designed can provide an added boost to your rankings.

Choosing correct file names is an important first task when you create Web pages. Besides your domain name, the first thing search engines discover when spidering through the pages of your Web site are your file names. Every single page of your Web site resides in a different file. These files can be written in HTML, PHP, ASP, or any other Web programming language.

When you title your pages with search-engine optimization in mind, you have a powerful opportunity to establish relevance to a certain topic or keyword. Before you even write your first page of content or acquire that first link back to your site, make sure your file names are relevant. Before you generate a Web page, have a specific topic in mind. Just as it makes sense to fill that Web page with keywords relevant to the topic, you should also give the file a relevant name.

If you are writing an HTML Web page about San Francisco hotels, and you are trying to rank highly for the search term “San Francisco Hotels,” consider naming the HTML file sanfranciscohotels.html or san-francisco-hotels.html. Making your file names relevant to the content contained within the page is also important for organizational purposes.

If you follow this practice, you name each Web page after the main key phrase that the page is about. Both search engines and your visitors associate the name of the page with the content that it contains. This titling is much more effective than a more conventional naming style like page1.html, page2.html, and so on, especially when you want to make changes to the content of individual pages on a Web site that has grown to hundreds or even thousands of pages.

Authorities at the major search engines have stated that hyphens in URLs and Web page file names are viewed as spaces by the search-engine ranking algorithms. This is important because hyphen usage in domain names and Web page file names aids in readability and organization when used in moderation. Overuse of hyphens is considered to be a spamming technique and can result in a penalty by the search engines if used to an unreasonable extent. The search engines do not specify to what extent hyphen usage is acceptable, but try to limit hyphen usage to no more than three hyphens per file name.

If possible, use no more than two. Recently, the search engines have begun to treat underscores similarly to hyphens, so you should limit your underscore usage as well. Also, make a consistent effort to keep URL lengths as short as possible. It appears awkward to human visitors if URLs exceed a certain length. Often, Web site visitors take note of the Web pages they visit and commit the URLs to memory. A 30-character URL is far easier to remember than a 300-character URL. Always remember to keep your human visitors in mind when you apply search-engine-optimization techniques.