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Working With Domain Names |
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Your URL is a cross between your address, your telephone number, and
your name. It is thus extremely important to choose the correct domain
and name for your business.
When naming your pages it is important to give them meaningful names.
Using a URL like http://www.yoursite.com/page4.html or
http://www.yoursite.com/article/99/ does nothing for you. Give your
pages, or if you run a dynamic site, your data identifiers, meaningful
names. If you do not decide to work with TOLS now or in the
future, assure that the other design company adheres to this principle.
Revisiting the previous example of writing effective content , if you
have a page about lenses and a page about film by naming the pages
"lenses.html" and "film.html" you are getting one more very important
keyword. Your URL is often weighted more than your page content so it
is a premium location for inserting keywords. Also, as with domain
names, you should separate the keywords with some sort of punctuation.
For instance if you have a page about outdoor lenses you should name it
"outdoor_lenses.html" as opposed to "outdoorlenses.html." This makes it
easier for parsers to pick out your keywords, not all of them will do
so without the break.
If you run a dynamic site, and use true language keys instead of a
simple numerical ones, the site will not be designed in the most
efficient way, but will make a substantial difference with the
long-term search engine rankings. Not only will it help your
search engine rankings, but any links to specific articles or pages on
your site from directories will also be ranked substantially higher.
If you do run a dynamic site there is another issue with your URLs that
you need to be aware of, it involves query strings. A query string is a
string of information tagged on to the end of a URL following a
question mark. For instance in the following URL the query string
portion is in bold:
http://www.yoursite.com/script.php?id=54&order=desc.
The reason that this is an issue is that some search engines will not
index pages with query strings, and not only that but query strings are
the easiest and most popular way to pass data to a dynamic page. With
the rise in popularity of database driven sites, which were once the
domain of big corporations, search engines started to realize that they
should be indexing these pages. Since then some, notably Google, have
started indexing pages with query strings. However not all search
engines do so yet, and to be honest with you from a customer standpoint
a standard URL is much easier to remember.
Lucky for you, we have dealt with the problem of passing data without
using query strings. TOLS has developed a set of methods to make your
site search engine friendly. What solution you choose will depend on
what software or platform you are (will be) using.
Another way your URLs can hurt you is if you store session information
in a URL. Many sites, especially ecommerce sites, track their visitor's
sessions. This is usually done with cookies but sometimes it's done by
putting sessions identifiers in your URL. In some cases the sessions
identifiers are only placed in the URL when cookies are not accepted by
the client. The end result is you have a URL that keeps changing every
time your search engine views your site, since they index pages by URL,
changing the URL really throws them for a loop and can prevent your
site from getting spidered at all. So if you run an ecommerce site, or
also a forum, you should definitely be on the lookout for this and
avoid it if at all possible.
Besides your content there are other places you should put keywords.
These include your page headings. Search engines are trying more
and more to read a site as a human would so that they can better rank
pages. So you should always put keywords in your headings.
Additionally sometimes people like to dress up their headings with
images instead of text. You should refrain from doing this. Replacing
text with an image may make it look prettier but it will do nothing but
hurt your search engine rankings since search engines cannot read text
from an image.
TOLS will also include your keywords in ALT and Title attributes for
image and link tags. Your ALT and title attributes shouldn't
simply be a list of keywords, but rather a short description that uses
keywords. Using these attributes will also make your website more
accessible for people with disabilities, so put them everywhere.
You should also never link to a page in your site with text like "Next"
or "Click Here." Like using images to replace text all that this does
is rob you of a spot to put keywords. Always use meaningful identifiers
in your links and in everything else.
By now you are probably used to all the talk about keywords. We've told
you to put keywords in your title, in your domain, in your URLs, and
now in your content. We cannot stress enough how important it is to do
all of this. Keywords make up a large portion of search engine ranking
formulas and almost 100% of directory ranking formulas, so the more you
squeeze in the better off you'll be.
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