Page naming conventions for your webpages

“What’s in a name?” Juliet Capulet asked.

Now you may be surprised why I’m opening with a line from Shakespeare here, but I promise that the question is relevant to online marketing. Names, you see, are a big deal even when your goal is to get the best ranking in the search engine results pages.

As a recap, search engines gather information by crawling your website. The key to getting a high rank in the search results is to ensure that your site is crawled properly. While search engine optimisation (SEO) offers a number of strategies to achieve this end, a good start is essentially following the appropriate naming conventions for your webpages.

Search engines assume that the most important elements of your site are in your main navigation area, which is found is virtually any page in your site. As such, their rankings formulas are tuned to grant more weight to the pages that are featured there. You can take advantage of this by placing your primary keywords in the filename or URL for these pages. Search engines place the bulk of their attention on the keywords found in the title text and the content of the page, but keyword mentions in the URL do bear some weight.

As an example, all factors considered, a webpage with the URL “www.abcd.com/macbook-air-review” is likely to have a higher rank for the search term “Macbook Air reviews” than websites with the same content but have URLs like “www.wxyz.com/apple-laptop-review” or “www.wxyz.com/top-10-best-laptops” in the SERPs.

Writing the best webpage names

So how do you make good webpage titles? First, make sure that your URL is not overstuffed with keywords. Search engines are programmed to react negatively to this practice. Keep the title of your entries, as well as the URL of your pages short and descriptive. As mentioned above, mention your keyword if possible. Search engines often rank pages highly when their URL matches with the search terms used by the searchers.

CMS and blogging platforms such as WordPress allow you to use custom URLs that may be different from your entry’s title. In such cases, make sure to create good URLs. You can use the following formula: www.yourURL.com/keywords1/keywords2.php

Here are some great examples:

Title: I do not wish my screensaver to lock my computer, thank you.
URL: disable-screensaver-password

Title: Get your search fix with two videos
URL: free-search-seo-videos

Title: Protect yourself: get a free credit report
URL: free-credit-report

Title: How to back up your Gmail on Linux in four easy steps
URL: backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail

Title: How to stop junk mail
URL: stop-junk-mail

Title: I love my pedometer
URL: best-pedometer

Title: Crap. My Ubuntu machine won’t boot
URL: ubuntu-freeze-no-resume

Title: What are the best iPhone applications?
URL: best-iphone-application

While your webpage’s URL may not be the biggest factor in determining search rankings, ensuring that it follows the right conventions makes it easier to organise and retrieve. So what’s in a name? A lot, apparently, but having the right keywords is a good start.

Website Validation Check... is there a noise coming from your engine?

If you are a business website owner and would be interested in receiving a detailed website validation check of the front page of your website drop me an email to matt@searchgroup.com.au  

Bit like a car that may gradually, or even suddenly, start to make an unusual noise from underneath the hood you have choices...

- keep driving and hope for the best

- pop the hood and take a look around yourself

- or head over to your trusted mechanic and get it sorted

At SearchGroup.com.au we regularly provide ongoing reports, and expand upon our initial website SEO audit where we outline any concerns that may exist under the hood of your website, particularly when it comes to the performance of your website both for the user experience and the performance and interaction of Search Engines across your website.

I continue to noticed in my role of performing reviews across websites that many clients have invalid websites that do not conform to web standards and meet the necessary quality checks applied.

The following short and simple reference is provided to explain in depth why it is beneficial to validate your website, and answer some of the common misconceptions around this:

http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html

Having a website that has errors or even warnings can be hazardous to its performance.

Just like when you drive behind another car that has a broken brake light, you the web site owner are not always aware of the problem because it seems to just work for you... but this may not be the same experience for everyone else on the internet. Which is why website validation checks exist to help find problems and provide an opportunity to fix them once and for all.

I typically find if a problem exists on the front page of your website then it carries through the rest of the website. This is NOT the time for you to learn html so don't panic! The validation reports that we provide include a summary of concerns. This will provide an outline to what is not 100% correct for your web site. The top section actually shows the code of your website along with comments amongst this code where problems exist.

We can then work with your in-house design and development team, or external web agency on resolving these problems. Our aim is for a perfect health score on the test, but even a reduction in the number of errors and warnings I will consider a win! And you will have a win too. By providing a website without errors will make for a better user experience and a much happier search bot with more opportunity of actually crawling through your entire website to find all your great content and getting this included within the Search Engine Results.

If you don't currently have a website designer available to assist you, or need a helping hand please let us know as our in-house design and development team Star3Media can provide support.