Keywords in filename

Hello,

What do you think of this strategy?

Instead of using index.php as your site index page have something like this

mywebsitename.com/my-target-keywords.html

That way when you can't get your keywords in the domain name they are in the index filename.

What is your opinion on this? thanks

 

Hi,

This sounds like a great idea.

However, the default root for any website is http://www.website.com/index.php, making some other page the default would need to be implemented wisely.

I think the correct (and search engine friendly) option woud be to have a 301 permanent redirect to the other page which you want to make your root page.

 

i did that on photo, it work out very well on google image search

 

Good idea, but make sure you keep an index.php or index.htm that redirects to mywebsitename.com/my-target-keywords.html. Something like...

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

 

Leave your homepage alone. You can do all those other tricks on other pages on your site.

 

@AveragePro: Excellent tip, but i would do this for pages other than homepage.

 

Personally, I don't like the idea... But to each his own.

IMO you should balance SEO and usability when making decisions about your site. It's a constant struggle. But when it comes to decisions related to my domain name and home page URL I typically choose usability over SEO.

For example, I prefer non-hyphenated domain names even though I ALWAYS use hyphens as keyword separators in folder names and page names on my site. I do this because hyphenated keyword phrases are harder for users to remember, they are longer for users to type, and they are harder for users to type. I also never show default document names like index.html, index.php, default.asp, etc. in my URLs because they make the URLs longer and they provide no keywords in the URL.

Your home page is the most likely URL on your site that someone is going to remember... That is because it is the shortest URL on the site.

By doing what you are suggesting you are making your home page URL harder to remember, longer, and harder to type. Yes, you can 301 redirect http://www.example.com/ to http://www.example.com/some-keyword-rich-page-name.php, but it just looks weird. It's not what users expect to see.

And having the keyword phrase as an exact match in a page name doesn't carry NEAR the weight as having the exact keyword phrase in the domain name. The SEO benefit you get by naming your home page http://www.example.com/some-keyword-rich-page-name.php does not outweigh the usability benefits of having a simple http://www.example.com/ home page URL IMO.

 

it definately help to increase in ranking.

 

Sounds like a great idea...try it and post results.