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Web Page Naming for Beginners

Posted by Michael Martinez on July 16, 2007 in Content Theory

SEO forums and blogs frequently discuss URL designations. The most often asked question, in my experience, is something along the lines of: “Is it better to use hyphens, underscores, or no break characters in domain names?”

Anyone who asks such a question has been reading too many SEO books, F.A.Q.s, tutorials, or somethings because it’s not about the domain names. It’s about the page URLs — the entire address of the page name space.

Search engines will do their best to parse words from out of URLs. There are good reasons to look at URLs to determine relevance. There are no good reasons to look at domain names to determine relevance. A domain name is only part of a full URL. That domain name may in practice be the entire URL but that will only be true for 1 page on any domain (unless you configure your server to show different content for your www. and non-www. URLs).

The domain name in itself means absolutely nothing as far as search engine optimization goes. I can take a name like xenite.org and get it to rank competitively for many different “hot” queries. Xenite.Org today ranks for well over 100 targeted expressions, many of them very competitive, some of them highly competitive. None of those expressions includes the word “xenite”.

If the best domain name you can get is ubuntu-1234.splick, don’t give up and say you’re doomed. The domain name means nothing. You can do a lot with a domain name. Here are the rules I try to apply in choosing domain names:

1. The domain name should be short
2. The domain name should be easy to remember
3. The domain name should be unambiguous
4. The domain name should be brandable
5. The domain name should reflect something about the character or quality of the content it will provide

You can do as much with a sub-domain name as with a domain name. Sub-domain names are a second chance to build relevance in your page URLs. But don’t confuse sub-domains with domain names. Search engines may look at sub-domains as independent “hosts” but you most likely don’t know what host really means to a search engine.

People in the SEO industry cannot restrain themselves. They have to try to explain and analyze everything and never give themselves time to just wait and see. Patience is the greatest virtue you can possess in this industry. Too few people seem to be exercising their patience virtue.

When I say a domain name should be short I don’t mean that it should be any specific number of characters long. It may help to choose a pronouncable domain name but remember that people will try to pronounce every domain name they see. Some domains actually become successful in part because they force people to spell them out.

If you’re debating whether to use hyphens or underscores, you should always go with the hyphens because they require less effort to type. While it’s true that Google admits only to parsing keywords between hyphens and treats underscores as if they were letters or digits, the real reason to prefer hyphens is that they are easier for people to type. Assume that the brand value of the hyphen is at least twice the brand value of the underscore.

If you’re debating whether to use hyphens or not, then consider how easily it will be for people to parse the keywords from your domain name. LionKingTheMovieRemade may work better than Lion-King-The-Movie-Remade if only because people will experience hyphen fatigue. After 2 hyphens, you have too many in your domain name. If you’re going to include hyphens, it’s better to use only 1 if you can.

The domain name is the anchor or foundation for the page name. You can append page names with many hyphens to a domain name and, thanks to blogging, pretty much get away with breaking all the rules. Blogs have taught people to cut-and-paste long page names. Keeping that in mind, you have four primary page name elements to work with:

1. The domain name
2. The Sub-domain name
3. The directory (or folder) name
4. The page file name

You should never include “index.???” in any of your internal or external links. Don’t burden people with the obligation to explicitly mention an index page name. They may become confused between index.htm, index.html, index.shtm, index.shtml, index.php, index.cgi, and variations on home and main.

Your server could be configured to treat each of those names as separate legitimate file types. Your server’s operating sysrtem certainly allows more than one index.??? file in any directory. It has happened more than once in my experience that people have linked to my index.A file rather than to a directory/folder URL and I have had to change my index file extensions because of changes in server configuration.

I have had to change out operating systems, Web servers, and include logic more than once through the years. I have also crashed a server trying to accomodate links pointing to the wrong file extension. Do not ever name a directory/folder index file for either your own internal navigation or when linking to someone else’s content.

You can add a fifth element to your page naming structures: CGI variables. These variables don’t actually have to be parsed by anything on your server. Some people use pseudo-variables to track click-throughs in their raw server logs. Appending a “?q=michael” parameter to a page URL in a link somewhere passes unique data to the hosting Web server.

I do actually implement all four primary page name elements in my own work. For example, on my personal SEO site I use seo.xenite.org/seo-information/seo-fundamentals.html. I cannot do anything about the fact that my domain is “xenite.org”. That is where I am and I work with it. That page currently does okay for “SEO fundamentals” (ranking in the top 10 on two major search engines and in the top 20 on two other major search engines).

Long page names are difficult to brand, however. For example, The Food Network has been branding http://www.myspace.com/foodnetworkstar for The Next Food Network Star instead of promoting http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/show_nf/ for The Next Food Network Star.

As a consequence of their poor understanding of the Internet, neither Food Network page ranks well on Google (currently the most popular search engine) for The Next Food Network Star. If you want to rank well for The Next Food Network Star and you can point a few links at your own well-constructed page URL, you might actually get other people to link to your page, too, simply because the URL makes sense.

The psychology of page naming is important to search engine optimization because search engines are sensitive to what is useful to the surfer and what seems spammy. So you certainly don’t want to overdo it with your page names. I don’t think buy-viagra.viagra-reseller-marketplace.info/viagra/buy-viagra-from-viagra-reseller-marketplace.html is a very good page name. Who would seriously want to link to such a page, since it screams out “spam! spam! spam!”?

Page names should be informative and self-explanatory enough that people can tell at a glance what the page content is. But the page names should be short enough that they won’t be truncated in search results, directory pages, or other people’s link lists. And the last thing you want anyone to have to do is scroll their browser window to the right in order to read your ridiculously long page URLs in forum and blog posts.

If you rely solely on a domain name you’re implying two things about your Web site: that the content is primarily about whatever the domain name signifies and that the domain itself may be somewhat thin on content. People tend to assume a lot of content exists on sites with deep links pointing to their content.

If you rely solely on a sub-domain you’re implying that the sub-domain has a substantial amount of content but people may forgive a 1-page sub-domain provided it links more deeply into the parent domain. Both domain names and sub-domain names suffer from user paranoia issues that arise from people having encountered too many spam domains.

Some spammers intentionally build content on deep pages in order to give the false impression of substance and depth to their content. But they almost always spam the URLs with repetitive keywords. So the less often you embed any particularly critical keyword in your full URL the better.

Ultimately, the search engines are not going to look only at page URLs when determining relevance. They’ll consider the page URLs along with page titles, page content, meta tags, and inbound link anchor text. While page URLs do indeed help in relevance scoring, their greater impact lies in the impression they make upon the person who sees them. The more credible your page URLs are, the more informative they are, the better they will help your conversion goals.

If you only take the surfers into consideration when choosing your page file names, you should do very well indeed. The search engines will figure it out.