Another trick to increasing your site’s SEO is giving your webpages descriptive file names. This has its pros and cons, some of which are not so obvious. For example, take Palace in the Sky, coded and created by Scribe of Ladystar. The file names of the gateway webpages are descriptive, for example, “top-fantasy-webcomics.php.” When you use a hyphen in a page title, search engines read what is between the hyphens as separate words.
WEBPAGE TITLES ARE SEARCHABLE. This is the pro of descriptive names.
The cons of doing this are that such page titles break “tradition,” and are not always obvious titles (they may be linked incorrectly by others because they are different than the norm). For example, what if my archive page wasn’t “http://warofwinds.com/archive.htm” but instead, “http://warofwinds.com/fantasy-comic-book-archive.htm”? Some may consider this a “cheap move,” but really–if it works, and it gets you more readers, what’s the problem? Do it!
Not only are webpage names searchable, but so are the titles given in the <head> area of the code. Again, I’m going to use Palace in the Sky as an example. Take the fantasy gateway once again. Instead of titling this “Fantasy Gateway,” Scribe has used, “The top fantasy adventure webcomics dragons swords magic myth and legends updated daily with new stories pages and illustrations.” All of that is searchable and relevant to the content of the site. Using these kinds of tricks in moderation will increase the number of search referrals you get, and more readers is the goal of every webcomic.
If you’ve never checked out the code of your website before, webpage titles are coded as such (very simplified, just so you know what to look for:
<head><title>TITLE GOES HERE</title></head>
November 14th, 2008 - 9:41 pm
This is slightly off topic but related: As early as possibly in the creation of a web-bound comic, search the title you plan to use to see what else is competing for it. You might find yourself rethinking your choice.
For example, my two comics: LilNyet.com has virtually no competition, as you would expect, but ScratchinPostComics.com has comics in the name because Scratchin Post was already taken by a blog. I didn’t know KEZ’s advice about hyphens or I would have hyphenated the word comics so it was searchable.
I keep track of a list of thousands of comics, and I have become sensitized to which names are promising and which are a kiss of death. Any name can work if the comic is outstanding, but a bad name makes life harder. Also, I know in my head lots of sites which are .com or .net but most people do not.
Browsers keep track of names pretty well so that you only have to enter a few letters, but certain words, like comic and webcomic, require the whole word plus and extra letter.
If I was starting a title now, I would take KEZ’s advice on a descriptive title but I would also have a standard domain name that forwarded to my site:
Guinea-Pig-Warriors-rodents-battling-to-save-Rodentia-most-awesome-teeth
and
GuineaPigWarriors.com
Of course, when talking only about inside pages, this issue is moot.
November 23rd, 2008 - 11:54 pm
[...] descriptions (even though these are now ignored by search engines, grr!), more text with keywords, webpage titles, the whole shebang. If you look on my front page, all the text is readable by search engines. Check [...]
March 2nd, 2009 - 10:55 pm
It really annoys me when certain kinds of websites have a dump of words in their title. I always thought the word-dump was better left in the keywords metadata. Neither of my comics have very descriptive titles to that end (Millennium includes that it’s a fantasy adventure online comic by me, which is good enough; LF just has its tagline… luckily it’s the 3rd Google result when you search its name now, lol). For comics and comic-related sites, I like it that way. SEO and subtlety, it’s hard to do.
March 2nd, 2009 - 11:40 pm
The problem with metadata is that it’s not used anymore. Too many people kept trying to put stuff in there that had nothing to do with their sites, so search engines ignore it, except for displaying your description if you have one. I still recommend people use it, especially if they’re displaying context-based advertisers which just read the code on the page, but I also recommend “subtle,” as you said, page titles.
For example, instead of “Archive” what about “Archive for the Fantasy Epic War of Winds”?
It’s descriptive, but also gets across the right points. I’m with you though. Obvious “OMG GOOGLE LOVE ME” page titles are hella annoying!