4 replies to this topic

[andrew55]

I've heard different things about this, so was looking for some feedback. To get maximum SEO benefits for a page, does it hurt to put it as an index.html page inside a directory such as in this example:

mykeyword/index.html

Or would it be better to have it such as:

mykeyword/mykeyword2.html

Or does it not really matter that much?

Also, another quickie - do pages usually do a lot better in the main directory of a site, or do they get equal benefits in a folder in the site?

Thanks for any tips.

[Randy]

Welcome Andrew !

Or does it not really matter that much?

You've answered the question yourself. Slapping keywords in your urls isn't going to help all that much. Not nearly enough to bother with tweaking your DirectoryIndex.

Also, another quickie - do pages usually do a lot better in the main directory of a site, or do they get equal benefits in a folder in the site?

It makes no difference. One is the same as the other as far as the search engines are concerned. What matters is click depth and how many links point at the pages in question.

[andrew55]

Randy - thanks for the suggestions. I just keep seeing that having the keyword in the text of the actual page name helps with SEO, so I didn't want to hurt anything by putting a lot of my pages as index.html inside directories.

So just to clarify, when putting links on other sites to increase pr of my site,

www.mysite.com/mykeywordfolder/

isn't any worse than:

www.mysite.com/mykeywordfolder/mykeyword2.html

I was thinking about changing some of my pages to index.html because this seems to look a lot better (when it's a link on another site) than a link that has the file type on it.

Also, I need to do more research on click depth - thanks for the pointer.

[Randy]

Well, if it helps any, we've discussed keywords in urls at least a few hundred times before.

re: Click Depth. It's just a shortened way to say getting good, relevant links pointing at your most important pages is a good thing. How the linking is done is one of the major signals the search engines use to determine how much importance they should give to a page.

As an example, let's say you have a home page at www.yoursite.com/index.html. This index page has a couple of links on it to internal pages of the site. One of those pages is www.yoursite.com/coolstuff.html. The other link to is www.yoursite.com/directory/sub/something/morecoolstuff.html.

Each of these pages will be passed the same amount of authority from your home page. They don't really care about the subdirectory depth, because you're giving them a signal with your internal linkage that you consider both pages to be equally important.

On the other hand lets say you have another level of pages. These are linked to from your /coolstuff.html pages. Everything else being equal, these second click level (meaning it takes two clicks from your home page to get to them) pages are normally going to be assigned a slightly lower level of importance than either the /coolstuff.html or /directory/sub/something/morecoolstuff.html pages. Simply because that's the signal you're sending to the search engines by the way you link to them.

The concept works the same for external links. The closer a page is in click depth to trusted, authoritative sources, the more importance they're given by the search engine algorithms.

Make sense?

[andrew55]

Thanks for the info. I remember some of the concepts about link depth, it just has been so long sense I've messed with the linking structure of our site. Makes much better sense though.