Keywords in Names and Identifiers for Search Engine Optimization

Tuesday, 20 April 2010 08:24

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the tailoring of a website before submission to search engines, and is a key part of the website development process. Without it users will not find your website in searches, and the search engine ranking of the site will be poor.

The words people type into a search box in a search engine are known as 'keywords'. If a web page you have developed contains these keywords, it will be listed in the search results. Part of the search engine optimization process is the careful use of keywords in web pages to ensure your page appears high in the search engine rankings. This is determined in part by the position of keywords, their frequency of use, and the competition for those words on other websites. If the keywords occur infrequently your page will be seen as being less relevant, and if they occur too frequently you will be accused of spamming.

There are many different aspects to achieving high rankings in search engine search results with keywords, but one strong influence will be your use of keywords in names and identifiers. These occur in every situation in a website where some item of data or object has to be named. If keywords are used as the identifier names, your page will be seen by search engines as being relevant to that search.

One important point to remember is that names or identifiers used on websites must not contain spaces. These names will become part of a path to an item, and a space will break the chain of characters. Spaces are represented in the path by a '%20' character, but should not be used. If you must have a gap in a name, use a hyphen or underscore. The following examples show how a web page about a New York hotel could be named:

Page name: new york hotel.htm (wrong)

URL: http://www.mysite.com/new%20york%20hotel.htm

Page name: new-york-hotel.htm (right)

URL: http://www.mysite.com/new-york-hotel.htm

Page name: new_york_hotel.htm (right)

URL: http://www.mysite.com/new_york_hotel.htm

Page name: NewYorkHotel.htm (right)

URL: http://www.mysite.com/NewYorkHotel.htm

Pages in a website should have keywords forming their names. Rather than using 'page23.htm', if you use 'NewYorkHotel.htm' it is obvious to someone maintaining the site what the page is about, and search engines will recognize the keywords. Each page should be named according to the content on that page. Within a web page, use 2 or 3 relevant keywords in identifier names to provide natural variation, with other appropriate words added.

Images on a web page should have keywords as part of their name. An example would be 'NewYorkHotelTitle.jpg'. Other naming conventions can be included. For example, rollover button images could be named 'butNewYorkHotel.gif' for the normal button view, and 'butNewYorkHotelOver.gif' for the rollover view. This has the organizational advantage of keeping all the button images together in the images folder, as the names are preceded with 'but'. Meaningful names make life easier for everyone.

Path names should include keywords. Instead of having an 'images' sub-folder to store site images, you could use 'NewYorkHotelImages'. This means the path to an image would be:

URL: http://www.mysite.com/NewYorkHotelImages/NewYorkHotelTitle.jpg

Forms are an important feature of a web page where a number of different names are used. The form can have ID and name attributes identifying it. The program that data is being sent to has a name, and the variables being sent have names. An example of form tags might be:

<form method="POST" ID="NewYorkHotelBookings" name="NewYorkHotelBookings" action="NewYorkHotelBookings.php">

<input name="NewYorkHotelBookingEmail" type="text" id="NewYorkHotelBookingEmail" value="" tabindex="1" size="30">

<input type="submit" value="Submit New York Hotel Booking" name="NewYorkHotelBookingSubmit">

</form>

Any other documents included on the website should have keywords included in their name. These would include Word documents, PDF files and spreadsheets. Again, ensure the file names do not have spaces.

You should, by now, understand the spirit of the message. File and identifier names must include keywords if you are to let search engines know they are relevant to particular searches. The keywords should be varied in structure, and used in a natural way. If you do this consistently, you will have made a good contribution to improvement of your site's search engine ranking.