Improving SEO: webpage names and titles

KEZ — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:23:44 +0000

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 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:

TITLE GOES HERE

Winged Wolf Studio » titles

Improving SEO: webpage names and titles