Creating a Website - Naming Convensions
Selecting a new Domain and Creating Pages
Even if many may think that pages within a website do not affect search-engine ranking, it is important to understand that this is not the case. Finding the right name for your domain and its pages is crucial since when someone perform a search using a search-engine, spider crawlers crawl from page to page and site to site idenitifying which could be the perfect match. Optimizing domain name and optimizing page names are some of the many things these crawlers look out for and thus even if it may not have a large impact, it may be worth the effort.
Optimizing Domain Name
The whole process of naming a website may be crutial for search-engines since they might try to get an idea of what the website is about from its domain name. When selecting a domain name, make sure it represents the company and its purpose. For instance if you are launching a new website to sell watches, a company name Tick-Tock may be understandable for clients but for search-engines it is hard to match Tick-Tock with watches. If it is important to include the company's name, try to add the main keyword before or after the company name, for instance: tick-tock-watches. In this way you are still keeping the company name, whilst helping search-engines identify that the website is about watches.
Another important thing to remember is that web crawlers cannot seperate words from others. If your domain name is now TickTockWatches, no searc-engine will identify either the Tick Tock, nor the watches. The most appropriate replacement for a space in domain names and URLs is the use of hyphens "-". Hyphens help search-engines to seperate each keyword in the URL. This means that if our domain is www.tick-tock-watches.com, search-engines such as google will read it as "www tick tock watches com" therefore they will be able to extract each keyword. It is important not to lose an opportunity for search-engines to identify our main keywords, especially for domain names.
If you believe that your domain requires more than one or two hyphens make sure it will not be too complex for clients to remember it. If so, the best solution is to buy an extra domain name with no hyphens for the clients and through the use of the 301 redirect, redirect the domain to the hyphened domain in order to keep the hyphened domain the main domain search-engines access.
Optimizing Page Names
When pages are named using conventional naming styles such as page1.html or page2.html, both search-engines and users, cannot associate the name with the actual page content.
A quick tip on how to manipulate all the naming conventions of your pages is to analyse the main content of the pages and figure out the main keyword. Once the main keyword/s have been identified, arrange them as to make good sense to name a file. Lets keep to the previous example, we want to create a new web page for the watch company to promote their offers, the best way to name such page would be: "watch-promotions" or "watch-offers". It is irrelevant for any search engine what type of file it is (aspx, jsp, html, etc).
It is also suggested to create a type of category listing to make it easier for search engines to identify a main topic. The best way to demonstrate this is to create sub directories of all the related pages. This would look like "www.tick-tock-watches.com/Offers".