Free Web Design Tutorials: File Naming for SEO

When you add a new page to your website using our editor the first thing you are required to put in is a File Name . Your File Name is what you will use when creating links to this page. A prefix and extension will be automatically added by the software once you create your new page.

For example:

Your website address (known as a URL), is http://www.mynewwebsite.com

You add a page with the file name my-first-page and click Submit.

This creates a new file named my-first-page.php . The extension .php is automatically added so don't type this in or you will get errors.

FYI - .php is the default file extension used for all new pages created by our editor. An extension tells the browser what type of file it is.

The link to this new page would be http://www.mynewwebsite.com/my-first-page.php

FYI #2 - Don't forget to add the forward slash / after your URL and before your file name when creating links to your files (pages).

Why Should You Care About File Naming for SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. In a nutshell, this is process of creating a website that will actually show up when someone uses a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to search for your products or services. There is a lot of competition out there so paying attention to the little things like file naming is important. It could be the difference between your website showing up on page 1 of the search results as opposed to page 8. You want to try to be near the top of the rankings because most users will only search a page or two deep before they find the information they are looking for.

Click the link for more information about how search engines work. It will make things easier to understand.

How To Name Your Files For Good SEO

For this tutorial we'll pretend that you are a plumber in Boston creating a file for your "About Us" page.

Rule 1 - use dashes to separate words.

You can't leave blank spaces in file names like about us. If you do, it may cause errors when some people click on your links. You would need to name this file either aboutus (no space) or about-us (with a dash) . From our experience, the dashes seem to work better with the search engines so do it that way.

Rule 2 - try to use a word or phrase that someone may actually be searching for.

If someone is using a search engine to look for your services they will probably not type about us into Google to find you. They will most likely type in something like plumber, plumbers or plumbing . Make sure that you use those words in your file name. So instead of naming your file about-us you should name it something like plumber-about-us or even about-our-plumbing-company.

Rule 3 - if you are local business then use your location in the file name.

Plumber, plumbing and plumbers are all pretty general terms. You will want to zero in a little closer to home when naming your files for SEO, so add in the city you are located in. For this example that would be Boston, so a good file name for your About Us page would be boston-plumber-about-us or about-our-boston-plumbing-company . This way, your pages won't pull up when someone is looking for a plumber in Seattle.

That's basically it. There are some more in-depth and time consuming ways of doing this that involve research an so on but we'll leave that for another tutorial on another day. Call us if you have any questions.