I have a site -----.com/index.html. So when I submit to directories should I use the full URL with index.html or just upto .com? Does anyone know which is best for SEO? Thanx in advance.
You likely won't see any difference in your rankings with one over the other. The key, however, is to pick one (the preferred or canonical URL) and use it everywhere. You should put 301 redirects in place such that anytime someone requests the non-canonical version of the URL that you 301 redirect it to the corresponding canonical version of the URL. This will eliminate duplicate content issues and split page rank/split link juice issues with all the engines. I personally ALWAYS prefer http://www.example.com/ over http://www.example.com/index.html any day. I ALWAYS hide default document names (index.html, index.php, default.asp, default.aspx, etc.) regardless of whether it's in the root or in some subfolder. For one thing it's shorter to type and easier to remember... Secondly if you ever looked at Google's WMT screen where they show you what Google sees as link text for your inbound links then you'd know that when other sites link to your home page using the URL as the link text that the first one would be seen as "http www example com" and the second would be seen as "http www example com index html" once Google has "normalized" the link text by replacing all punctuation and special characters with a space. This means if "example" (your domain) is a keyword, having index.html will reduce your keyword density within the link text any time someone links to you with http://www.example.com/index.html instead of http://www.example.com/ and slightly reduce your ability to rank for "example". Like I said it won't likely make ANY visiable difference in rankings. Keyword rich URLs carry only a very small amount of weight in the overall ranking algorithm and and the density of the keyword within the keyword rich URLs will have virtually no effect for non-home page URLs containing default document names. Where it could help slightly is when a lot of other sites link to your home page with your URL as the link text. Then keyword density within the link text can sometimes have some noticable effect. Again it's minor but because link text carries so much weight, the effects of keyword density within the URL likely gets amplified. A link with "keyword phrase" as the link text carries more weight when trying to rank for "keyword phrase" than a link with "some long phrase containing keyword phrase". So a link text of "http www keyword com" IMO would be better link text than "http www keyword com index html" because the keyword from the domain name has a higher density within the link text (25% density instead of 16.67% density, respectively). So IMO it's always a good idea to maximized the density of the keyword within the URL by eliminating unnecessary words from the URL that are not part of your URL's targeted keyword phrase (i.e. default document names). Unless you're trying to rank for "index", "html" or "index html" then I'd suggest going with http://www.example.com/ as your canonical home page URL. But again the effect is so miniscule you're not likely to notice it unless lots of sites link to your URL w/ your URL as the link text (home page will likely have the biggest effect). This is a super-fine tuning SEO technique... But using lots of super-fine tuning techniques like this can add up to make a visiable difference.