Another Dumb Question - HTML file names

As I mentioned elsewhere I've been at this a month and have seen an increase in SERPS for my key term from 50 to 20 on my index.htm so I am fairly chuffed. However, given that recip links are difficult to find for my market I am now thinking of playing with other things to see the boost.

Whats the feeling of how much weight Google gives to the HTML file name and directory. Given that my primary keyword phrase is "timesheet software" how much benefit am I going to get from renaming my index.htm to timesheet_software.htm ?

Mark

 

It is probably unwise to play with your actual front page title. But other pages and directories will certainly not suffer, and you may well gain, from renames that use relevant words. (Just don't go crazy and try to stuff a thesaurus into every page and directory name.)

Also, be aware that there is a well-populated school of thought that hyphens work better than underlines for separating words in file/dir names. (There is also a minority report to the effect that Google dislikes them--ya pays yer money an' ya takes yer chances.)

 

OK thanks, I was very nervous about messing with this file as this is the source of almost all my SERPS rankings and obviously the lions share of my PR too. I'll play with some of the product pages and see what eventuates.

Thanks again,

Mark

 

Keep in mind that if you have existing backlinks to any pages other than your front page, you should put 301 redirects up if you rename those linked-to pages, so you don't lose the benefit of the links. (There have been several explanations at various times here and there on the forum how to do redirects.)

 

Early this year, I changed my filenames from 01.shtml, 02.shtml, etc... to keyword.shtml, keyword-keyword.shtml, and keyword-keyword-keyword.shtml.

Traffic doubled.

Of course, your newly renamed pages will show PR0 for a long long time, so it can be a fairly painful process.

And, of course, my .htaccess file is *huge*.