SEO Tips For Files And Folders

Posted by admin on July 11th, 2008 at 01:09pm

In a previous SEO article I discussed the SEO strategy of having a keyword rich domain name and the subsequent SEO benefit that you can derive from that, but in this SEO article I will explain that you can achieve some of that same SEO benefit merely by labeling your files and folders with your primary keywords.

While you will not gain as much SEO advantage from this as having a good keyword domain, you can make substantial SEO gains with this SEO tactic.

Ok so the first question that I should get out of the way which you will inevitably ask is; which is better, files or folders?

The answer is it does not matter, however if you choose folders do not make it several levels deep meaning site.com/keyword/keyword/keyword/keyword is not going to really help you much. Keep it to 2 or 3 levels deep at most for maximum SEO effect.

The next question you will probably ask is which is better; hyphens or underscores? Well, thats the subject of an upcoming SEO tutorial so for now I will just say hyphens but will save the explanation for later.

Also you should make sure not to use more than 2 hyphens to seperate your keywords meaning seo.com/search-engine-optimization/ is ok but dont use more than 2 hyphens to seperate 3 keywords or it will begin to look “spammy” to the search engines.

Once you have your new file or folder with your preferred keyword(s) set up you should obviously make sure to link to it from elsewhere on your site. Linking to it from your main navigation bar is ok but for maximum SEO benefit you should utilize the hyperlink from within the body of relevant text.

What this means is that making a hyperlink to a page about one subject from an irrelevant page will not maximize your results. Ideally the surrounding text from the linking page should at least have some relevance to the page you are linking to as the search engines algorithm can detect the relevancy of the surrounding words around a hyperlink. On small sites this is not an issue but with larger, more general sites it can be something to be aware of.

Under SEO