How to Use Keywords in Filenames

• In your website pages always use keywords in the filenames.
• Do not use space in between filenames.
• Use hyphen (-) or underscore (_) in between the filenames. Hyphen is preferred because;

1. Google treats hyphen as a delimiter that is “internet-marketing” is treated as “internet marketing”
2. Whereas a filename with underscore “internet_marketing” will be treated as “internet_marketing” only.

• Instead of naming a page as product.html, use a keyword related to that product. Eg: css-validator-tool.html
• Do not overload the filenames with too much of keywords. Eg: do-you-want-to-make-money-online-with-simple-11-steps.html
• Use only lowercase in the filenames & folder name as some servers or CMS may be case sensitive.
• Do not place all the files at root level but make a folder at root level and place the web pages in it. Use good keywords for the folder name.
• If you are creating sub-domains then use short keywords rather than a lengthy one.

Lowercase vs. uppercase filename:

For example we will consider a page like www.domainname.com/products-services.html. While promoting the page I used the link as www.domainname.com/Products-Services.html.

I just changed the “P” and “S” to uppercase in the URL. If you visit both the URLs, you may be able to view the same page but search engines will treat them as two different pages. You will also get into duplicate content issue as search engine considers it as two pages. In addition the traffic which is coming to that page will be divided. That is total visits to the page is 200 but 100 visits using first URL and 100 visit using second URL.

Optimizing Images:

• Use keywords in filename of images but make sure that filename should represent the image because in Google image search, it will pull the images which Google finds while crawling the web page content. Eg: if the image is of your company logo then name it as “companyname-logo.jpg” rather than saying “tennis-ball.jpg” which is your product name.
• Always use ALT attribute to describe the image. Do not forget to use keyword phrases.
• Use Title attribute but do not use exact text which is used in ALT attribute. Use some different keyword phrases.

Source by Syed Hyder Ali