Winning Strategies for Online Success!
Before building your website, organize the content into folders and give some thought to a page naming scheme.
If you are an English major, you can use the outline or table of contents format you learned in grammar school to organization your folders and pages. Remember? Section 1, Sub-Section A, B, C etc. Programmers and engineers can build a flow chart. Or, use 3x5 cards. Any one of these methods will work for the initial organization process and can be translated into web folders and pages later.
This initial organization will help you design the website, help the user navigate your website, and help google crawl and index your content. If you only have a few pages you may not need folders to organize the them, however, if you plan to add pages over time organization the folders now to avoid moving pages later on. General pages for about us, contact us, etc. can be at the top level of the website. Articles, reviews, case studies, or anything else that will be added to regularly go in separate folders.
Choose a naming scheme and stick with it! For example, all lowercase letters and hyphens between words translate into:
Include keywords in your folder names and page names. products/dog-food.html includes the keywords "products," "dog," and "food" while products/products1.html omits "dog" and "food" and repeats the "products" keyword.
Using uppercase such as aboutUs.html (instead of about-us.html) can be an issue with search engines that distinguish between cases. If a user hyperlinks to your page with aboutUs.html and another user hyperlinks with aboutus.html some search engines see these as two different pages with duplicate content... a no-no in search engine land!
Posted on July 17, 2009 | Permalink | Join email list
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