Here’s another Google seo factor which I am about to reveal to you about naming your content on your website for all my readers who have taken time to learn proper search engine optimisation from a specialist.
Have you ever wondered how naming your file names influences its meaning? Whether it’s the name of your web pages, your image names, your video file names. Naming them properly, makes a difference for letting Google understand what your content is about. Let me give you an example:
Webmaster Academy On this URL http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=checklist.cs&tab=1095542
Google says “Use descriptive file names. The file name black-fender-guitar.jpg tells us a lot more than image1.jpgâ€
Even naming is important, because Google indexes images as well, it’s part of their online business model to be the search engine, not just for textual search, image search, video search etc. they want to be the search engine internet surfers call upon for everything. Therefore, it’s in Google’s best interest to determine what in the world, the indexed content is all about. I assure you, they spend millions each year, just to work that out better and better.
You heard of the Panda bear, and its cousin Penguin, mark my words, before long, it will be another animal born, and its parent will be Google. Anyway, back to our story;
When you name your files, you need to be descriptive (that’s nothing new) yet, what about using underscores or hyphens, does that make a difference?
Let’s look at couple of file names as an example and see:
- seo-specialist.html (example 1)
- seo_specialist.html (example 2)
The above examples may look the same for many webmasters, meaning, the weight and relevance determination techniques Google uses may consider these URL’s as same. But we must know, that, for us to achieve higher organic rankings, we need to know what we are dealing with:  Google algorithms, thus,
You should use file names with hyphens when you are targeting keywords that can be targeted individually (separately).
You should use file names with underscores when you are targeting keywords that can be targeted together. Let me demonstrate because I know it can sound complicated (but it really is not)
In the above example 1, I would use hyphens as a file name for my web page, IF, I wanted to target words like this: website specialist, OR, conversion specialist, OR, Google ranking specialist etc.
Because of the hyphen, the keywords used can be individually targeted to separate them from other keywords.
In the above example 2, I would use underscores because, I am actually targeting both words at the same time, and whatever other words I can attach to those terms. Because of the underscore, both terms are glued together, thus, any longer keywords can be attached to it as a whole sequence of keywords, let me illustrate;
Try using this method when naming your web pages and file names, as you can see, both can be used for different purposes.
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